On Mastodon on the evening of November 17th, 2023, @Ricki.Tarr asked the following question:
And the responses have been pretty amazing. But my own feeling is this:
@RickiTarr Most of them do, tbh. I think the underlying message between “Every Frame a Painting” captured it well. (Miss that channel.)
But seeing as I used to use 80s and 90s action movies for examples in my film class, I might be an outlier.
Anyhoo, a few:
#madmaxfuryroad The desert storm.
#300 The fight on the cliff
#serenity The Serenity dolly shot to open
#GrandBudapestHotel Just the color design, in all of it.
#johnwick Fights as ballet
#matrix2 The Chateau foyer fight
And more…
/2 Been thinking about this all night, how most of my examples would come from some basic and banal films.
And I think that’s the beauty of it, is that they’re all #art
The underlying assumption in responses to the thread is that “art” is defined by something that must be transcendent or sublime, a singular work that stands above others is somehow “art” in ways that the others are not.
But I still find art in #billandtedsexcellentadventure or #videodrome or #returnofthelivingdead
3/ Or #conanthebarbarian or #jurassicpark or #thefifthelement or any of hundreds of other films I find engaging.
Now some films might push this a little bit. If I’m Dan Harmon, I might have issues with #NowYouSeeMe f’rex, and struggle to find the art there, but this is where the subjective alights within #cinema
(Waitasecond, can I still use #frex , or did some tool decide to use it as the label for an AI-generated thesaurus for your smartphone in the last week?)
4/ Anyhoo, where was I? (phone call disrupted the tenuously connected synapses there…)
Oh yeah, there’s beauty in the basics, which is really what I was getting at.
The most recent flick I saw was Aronofksy’s #PostcardFromEarth the psuedo-doc made to showcase the capabilities of #TheSphere in #LasVegas
It’s a brief sliver of a movie with a #scifi wrapper and an eco-friendly message.
It’s a singular experience, worth checking out. Most definitely #art
but so was #furyroad
Art can make you feel the little things too, is what I’m getting at.
Which is where I’m sitting at. So I’m thinking I’ll list out the films, and the frames, that strike me as “art”, however it gets (subjectively) defined, and I’ll run through the list here in the next few days.
Also, more on that Aronofsky film coming soon…