#that is the fundamental premise of this artform!!!

[nonstandardrepertoire]

"guilt tripping the audience for behaving like an audience" has gotta be one of my least favorite theatrical tropes. like oh? we accepted the convention that people are acting out pretend scenarios and thus did not intervene when someone "did" something bad onstage? we paid less attention to a character that the narrative told us was unimportant? if we had rushed up on stage en masse to try to stop this event unfolding, the entire show would have fallen apart because you are actually actors following a script and audience intervention isn't scripted? and you want us to feel bad for interacting with the text as the text expects and teaches us to interact with it? no, fuck you, write better material

[mogwai-movie-house]

Same Anon who asked about Richard Linklater here. I wanted to offer my perspective. While it is indeed mundane, I think his films execute really well the premise of just, two or more people talking. That's something interesting to me.

Also indeed check out Waking Life, it's totally a worthwhile film.

I find myself thinking a lot lately about what cinema actually is, at its most fundamental, which is - or was, originally - a story being told through 24 still photographs a second. This is what defines it as an artform and marks it out as different from a play or a book or a variety show or whatever else. Once "the talkies" came in, an awful lot of the possibilities of expression of that artform got sidelined and replaced by just a lot of talking heads standing still and yapping. The French even had a term for the same old routine camera placement used in all the movies being pumped out by Hollywood: "The American Shot".

If the dialogue of a film is extraordinarily witty, thought-provoking or dazzling in some other way, such as, say, His Girl Friday, Annie Hall, The Seventh Seal, The Name of The Rose or The Godfather, then a static camera doesn't have to be a great detriment, and the great creativity in other areas can cover for it. But the indie filmmaking trend of simply depicting ordinary people sitting around saying everyday things until the camera runs out of batteries has just never done anything for me: I can't think of any film of that type that I've enjoyed, so I accept I'm not the audience for it.