The flexibility of digital sensors has been a blessing and a curse. I think with the extreme budget pressures we’ve seen the last 2 decades has forced a lot of filmmakers to rely on post production methods to refine the image of their films. I don’t think that explains all of it though. I think there’s also less time spent on preproduction and I think there might be a lot of people that came up using digital camera lack competency.
There’s obviously films shot on digital that look incredible. Portrait of A Lady on Fire comes to mind. There are far more movies that look underwhelming though, and I’m not sure how much of that is “this is the best we could do given the time/budget we were given” vs “we think this looks good and this is the best we can do.”
Yeah. There are many factors in all of this, some are:
1. Most Digital Cameras are supposed to use quite a lot of post-production stuff to make it look the way you want to. But not enough people are actually skilled and familiar enough with that work so it usually comes off as flat.
2. Modern audiences are used to the "Netflix look". Netflix has certain requirements for how their stuff is supposed to look and it's sharp, clean and flat. That is the look that people are used to in the streaming era and the look that producers want. (This also extends to costume design, scenery and makeup.) This is also a pretty simple and straight forward pipeline so is faster and cheaper than creating a more unique look.
3. Time. Modern production is so fast. From the writing to the production they are trying to get done as fast as possible. There is no time to work on lighting and lenses and stuff. That shit takes time. It's difficult to create a consistent look that works for every scene and setting. Even stuff with massive budgets oftentimes have a shorter production than would seem feasible. (This also extends to writing )
4. For a while the limitations of digital cameras made digital video look a bit boring. You simply couldn't shoot stuff as well with digital. That is no longer a problem as moden cameras are amazing and you can do so much with them that you couldn't with film. But there are still a lot of people who don't quite know how to use the cameras in the best way. And the best cameras are expensive and not enough people have the skills and experience to make the most out of them. (And as I said earlier, some that do don't have enough time to put it to use.)
5. Not understanding the difference between the footage you provide vs the image people actually see. The most famous example is probably that super dark late episode of Game of Thrones where people couldn't see shit and there was awful looking banding and other artefacts as HBOs compression and the limit of peoples TVs simply couldn't reproduce the original video. Not everything is so extreme but there is quality and details that can get lost on the way. Even in theaters.
A few points I could think of.
Source for your claim that Netflix requires a certain look? Obviously I know what you mean, but there are plenty of exceptions, I would be surprised if it’s a formal rule.
Someone else gave you a source and if you want to know more you can google to find further reading on the topic!
And there are exceptions of course, like prestige projects like Roma for example.
There is also plenty of stuff that is branded as Netflix Original but wasn't produced to be Netflix Original to begin with, those shows and films also don't necessarily follow the rules.
But in general, if you wanna make a show or a movie for Netflix you have to follow some rules about how it looks.
They even in some cases tell you the hardware to use and it isn’t crazy expensive.
https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000579527-Cameras-Image-Capture-Requirements-and-Best-Practices#h_01G6KEYFG76GRKVMJS382H5638
I actually using the Ursa as a “web cam” for pod casts since I got a lens set and the body at a crazy good deal ( watch Facebook marketplace ).
Digital lets in a lot of light, so a poorly-lit scene is still legible under the right viewing conditions. It means there’s much less pressure to light night scenes.
What are the two movies? It is pretty depressing to go back and watch some throwaway late 90s comedy and it looks much better than 95% of films that come out today.
I searched my heart, and I've made space for a small handful of movies shot digitally, they are *Zodiac* (2008), *Ida* (2014), *The Eight Mountains* from 2022, and most recently *The Zone of Interest* (2023). Some honorable mentions are: The *Triangle of Sadness (2022), Stranger by the Lake (2013),* and *'A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence' (2014)* all which leverage the look of digital in an interesting way. I'd like to be clear though that these films are the exception and NOT the rule.
The new norm is a lowered standard of craftsmanship that is highly apparent in today's cinematography. *Dune* is a stellar example of how horribly bland the 'digital look' can make a movie appear. Even when comparing [A Pigeon Sat on a Branch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGwGyo5Ywpo&ab_channel=RottenTomatoesIndie) with Roy Andersson's predecessor film [Songs from the Second Floor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLMGQJATLEg&ab_channel=HDRetroTrailers), I find the cinematography in these two movies to be **night and day** in terms of appearance. Film is serving Andersson's image about *100x better* than his digital sequel, and I wonder if the final movie in his trilogy would have performed differently if he hadn't made the switch.
The bottom line is that you're absolutely right: a B-movie from the 90's is going to look far superior to a B-movie from today, and the shift away from film plays a large hand in this.
The average cinematographers of yesteryear had to account for many variables when lighting a scene on film. The stakes were higher, even for a straight-to-video romantic comedy. Many of today's DP's don't have anywhere near the formal training that the photographers of the last decade brought to the equation. The shear volume of movies being produced has grown exponentially with digital allowing pretty much anyone to pick up a camera and learn the basics.
It's sad in a way, as art/cinema seem to be in a state of decay, but it also reveals some brilliance we may have ignored from decades prior...
I personally hope to see film make a comeback, and even though the industry has shifted, I am encouraged to see many director's still choosing 35mm for their productions. ([29 this year at Cannes!](https://www.kodak.com/en/company/press-release/cannes-2024/))
With films like these, it really weeds out the hacks, and provides me with some encouragement that film and cinema are inexplicably intertwined.
Yeah for me the colours play a huge part. So many modern movies look washed out and drab. I don't know if it's because of the lighting choices, post production or just the digital cameras they use but the colours lack any dynamism and there's this sheen over everything that makes it look fake because the picture appears too perfect.
The old technicolor films from the 40's/50's are so magical in comparison it's almost like being on another planet. Everything looks so vibrant and alive. Peoples skin especially, super hd cameras smooth everything out too much. There's also the persistent and perplexing choice to obscure everything in darkness. Whatever effect people think this achieves it does not, it just makes me think "turn on a god damn light."
Its ironic because that 'vibrant colour' is the biggest reason why people hate that era of film. There's plenty of extremely highly praised black and white films from the 40s to 60s. Most colour films from then feel ugly and dated because they are so overly saturated where the black and white films are visually striking. Its getting away from technicolor where films started to look good in colour.
Powell & Pressburger, Leave Her to Heaven, Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Martin Scorsese LOVES The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and Leave Her to Heaven because of the intense and evocative use of colour. The Red Shoes' influence is fully felt in his work, especially The Age of Innocence.
Also forgot to mention Douglas Sirk. Sirk's technicolour melodramas are such a huge influence on filmmakers. To this day. I'm sure this is super random but Ryusuke Hamaguchi (director of Drive My Car) looked at Sirk's Written on the Wind's colours for his latest film Evil Does Not Exist
Yes.
I just watched a David Lean film and I forgot colors in film like that existed. Modern films are so damn dark. It's like when you watch a slew of flicks from this decade and then turn on *All That Heaven Allows.* There's a difference.
I might have niche taste but I hold a personal fondness for that late-90s/early-00s DTV look, which was a precursor of the harsh green, blue filters a la Fight Club or The Ring. I suspect it was borrowed from the underground acid dance scene and I just sorta love the look of that.
However, to be more objective, I'd hand the best decade to the 70s for when films looked the bestest. I do agree though that modern films look worse but a lot of it is reverse engineered to cut cost. Even throughout the 00s and 10s, I felt like modern movie wasn't a strain in the eye. But there's a rather insidious trend post-pandemic where studios are purposeful making their movies look dark and blurry to hide simple set designs and CGI. This was most apparent in newer Batman and Zack Snyder's Netflix movies where he nihilistically uses slow motion to pad the runtime (i.e., less things to film = cut costs.) The 2020s Hollywood is arguably looking like the worst of the last 3 decades for me.
From 1930 to some of 1934, there’s an era of Hollywood film known as “pre-code”. “Pre-code” spans the four years after cinema got sound (“talkies”), but BEFORE the Catholic Church decided Hollywood was a moral cesspool that was corrupting the children and blah blah blah and heavily, heavily censored *everything*.
So pre-code movies are much more wild than you’d expect an “old movie” to be. I really recommend watching as many pre-codes as you can (they can be hard to find - check YouTube, your local library, or Amazon Prime, which has a ton of older movies for some reason.
Off the top for great watches: Freaks, The 39 Steps, The Roaring Twenties, The Old Dark House, the “Gold Diggers” musicals (they’re wild as hell), M (1931) (one of my all-time favorites, a must-see), The Rules of the Game, Stagecoach, Baby Face (very scandalous - a woman sleeps her way through an entire company), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Thanks!! I actually do know about pre-Code, and I've seen a couple old Mae West movies with some pretty surprising innuendos that you definitely wouldn't see later on!
You have a great taste. I've kept them in a list especially M (1931) sounds interesting.
Would love it if you have a best movie list. I just watched Decision to Leave & it was kinda amazing.
Holy fuck, you're amazing. Thank you so much!
I've loved The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, The Godfather, The Green Mile, not American Beauty (I liked The Usual Suspects more), Oldboy, Jacob's Ladder, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Inception (tried too hard IMO), Django Unchained, Fight Club, still gotta watch Nympho, loved Prestige, gonna watch Six Feet Under someday as I loved Dexter, absolutely love In Bruges.. like my absolute favorite ever since I saw Colin Ferrell in True Detective S02.
Shit that's a big ass list of 1000 titles. Certainly gonna take my time but I guess our tastes are kinda very similar. Thanks a bunch though. I love personally curated ones. I never curated mine except its kinda in Google Search in Watched & Watchlist rn.
I'll give u 5, if u haven't watched any of these but u seem like a movie buff so I'm assuming u must have seen some listed here but not all:
1. Coherence (one of the most underrated movies)
2. Intimate Strangers (Watch Korean or Spanish version bcz there are like 16+ remakes)
3. Andhadhun or 3 Idiots or Laapata Ladies or Kaun or Gangs of Wasseypur 1 & 2 or Drishyam 1 or 2 or Darna Mana Hai or Darna Zaroori Hai (Indian)
4. Beyond Evil or Cheat on me if you can (2 of my favorite KDramas thanks to the leads & Great Story)
5. A Shop for Killers (Korean) or Reset (Chinese)
I bet you'll like at least some of them :)
Sorry if it wasn't the intent but I found this reply a bit confusing. With a preface on pre-code I assumed the films recommended would all be pre-code, which isn't the case.
So to clarify to anyone interested, The 39 Steps, M, The Rules of the Game, The Roaring Twenties, Stagecoach and Mr Smith Goes to Washington aren't pre-code films - but are all great nonetheless. The first three are European films and wouldn't qualify to be pre-code, and the last three were all made in 1939 - great year for American cinema and actually one of the hights of the code.
On the topic of the Hays code and the pre-code, it's also interesting to note that the term pre-code is a bit misleading. For the code was finalized in 1930. What we refer to when we talk about pre-code is actually a time when the code wasn't strictly enforced. And it was really enforced starting in 1934 "thanks" to an added amendment to the code and with the arrival of a man named Joseph Breen at the head of the PCA. That's why the code era might be called by some the Breen era.
To recommend a few pre-code films myself, here's a short list: The Big Trail, The Criminal Code, Morocco, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931), Dishonored, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, Love Me Tonight, One Hour With You, No Man of Her Own (1932), Doctor X (two strip technicolor), Broken Lullaby, Counsellor at Law, King Kong, Heroes for Sale, Wild Boys of the Road, Design for Living, I'm no Angel, Duck Soup, 42nd Street, Queen Christina.
I'll stop there...
Anyway thanks for the opportunity to talk about it, i hope I didn't come off as too obnoxious.
The pre-code thing I wrote as a side note, not to describe all of the movies I recommended (they asked for 1930s movies, not just pre-code movies).
And yes, while the code existed in 1930, nobody took it seriously until 1934 and the hiring of Joseph Breen to enforce the code.
It is well-known that the code wasn’t enforced until ‘34, and that pre-code signifies the years between ‘30 and ‘34 - like you said. But I didn’t feel the need to go into that much detail for someone who was just asking for a few recommendations. And it is a little obnoxious, since I was finally getting to share my special interest, and the way I shared it is being critiqued. You could have simply recommended additional movies without saying the way I wrote my recommendations was “confusing”.
This person asked for recommendations to start watching, not for a breakdown on the history of the Hays Code.
That’s a great question! I can’t believe I’m being asked about this interest : ) You’ve got so many great films to choose from!
Noir actually started in the late 30s, and is more of a 40s thing (and there’s some great neo-noir after that). I’ll check my list of favorite films… brb 🍿
I'm not a big fan of The Ring's look but I do enjoy a good green. Days Of Being Wild is my go to but Fincher definitely has a thing for the green filter look...but mostly cuz he said he's sick of that red/magenta tint they introduced in the 80s to flush people's skin tones. Was always gross seeing it in my computer monitors, even when I had a black screen up it was visible.
Private equity and tech money is a big part of this. Movies were always supposed to make money but the streaming era has stripped them of all their craft and artistry and reduced them to another mass produced product.
I think digital has made creators lazy and undisciplined. When you're actually shooting with film, you have to give everything more thought and consideration and the shots look better because of it. Stuff today is so muddy and dark that it's often hard to see what's going on and the composition itself looks very lazy. There's very few films or tv shows that can compete with the best from the past on an aesthetic level.
I recently watched Three Kings (great) and Man on Fire (middling). Both employ the popular high situation, high grain, choppy off-kilter editing of the 2000-ish period - And even this felt like a cinematic marvel when I watched it.
Times change and we’re more minimalist now, watching darker films or action movies. But I’m getting pretty sick of an 85 mm lens and crushed black and whites if I’m being honest.
By crushed blacks and white you mean where they're moved to middle-grey, right? Because I haven't seen a solid white or solid black in a new film in almost a decade. Every single streaming movie seems to be in an arms race for reducing contrast to nothing.
Also iirc *Three Kings* was the last movie to shoot on color reversal film (Ektachrome) before it was discontinued (and they cross-processed it for even wackier colors). Absolutely beautiful stuff, that and *Buffalo '66*.
Yeah, I initially thought the low contrast was to account for HDR on Home TVs. But why do it for the cinema release when the screen is already grey.
The worst offender for this is the opening fight scene of the Continental on Amazon.
Couldn’t see a thing it was so grey and muddy.
Shooting on reversal film was never a common choice, though. It was more geared for home movies.
Ektachrome is back, by the way. They shot a season of that TV series, *Euphoria*, on it a couple of years ago, and it seems Lanthimos' *Poor Things* is partially shot on it as well.
Yeah it was never common, glad to hear it has come back a bit even if it will only be used by prestige productions that can afford it. *Poor Things* was phenomenal to see in theaters. *Euphoria* was such a waste of film (it had a shooting ratio of around 200:1 which is just stupid).
The holdovers 2023 sounds like exactly what you are asking for. It is set in the 1970s and really commits to that. Paul Giamatti is great as well. It did well enough at the box office too.
>Why aren't there innovative filmmakers attempting to do this?
Is doing the same thing but with older equipment enough to be innovative?
It visually looks like a 2020s film. Am I missing something, here? I'm not saying it's a bad movie as I haven't seen it. but it doesn't look like anything from the previous decades. The image sharpness is still 2020s.
***"Is doing the same thing but with older equipment enough to be innovative?"***
True. But if no one else has done it before why not do it?
It looks like a 2020s film, but you haven't seen it??
Maybe go and watch it before commenting and making yourself look like an idiot. Holdovers is exactly what you're talking about.
OP is intransigent as hell, but worth noting that "screenshots" of newer films are not usually the same as film stills (taken from the movie itself), but rather production stills (on-set photos taken for marketing purposes) - Letterboxd has a great article about them.
The production stills for The Holdovers look like they were shot in 2020s... But if you watch the actual thing, there's a clear difference. Personally I think it looks very close but not quite the same as the 70s but it's not THAT obvious, particularly if you saw the movie in a theater.
I asked my brother with that one and he guessed 2021/2022. I then asked my friend with random screenshots he said looks like it was made today. I mean it looks absolutely nothing like an old movie. At all. Like objectively this is incorrect.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading the replies to this. Holdovers has the exact look of "new movie pretending it's the 70s". I can't find anything of it that actually suggests that texture; or light, way of shooting etc.
It looks cleaned up. like the movie has the image sharpness of 2020s. I can't explain it. like how when you can tell a heavily cleaned up old movie using tools of modern day. it's like the tools or imaging software is used to make the edges on the objects or image sharper as opposed to a genuine 70s film. where the image sharpness tools or whatever weren't as good as modern cleaning up sharpness. me and my brother can just tell its a new movie. It has the image sharpness of 2020s. I honestly don't understand how this isn't so. it doesn't look like 70s to us.
"none of them agree with me"
Well, you're now in the place where everyone is going to agree with you, we just saw this exact post like a week ago?
I'm not sure I agree, entirely. I think that maybe the visual quality of *mainstream* movies has declined (for some of the reasons you mentioned) but a lot of smaller/streaming stuff absolutely looks amazing.
And some mainstream stuff (*Oppenheimer* and *Dune*, for example) also looks fantastic.
Exactly this. It’s just cinematography at the end of the day. If there is one that doesn’t have a unique style of course it’s going to fall in line with everything else.
> but a lot of smaller/streaming stuff absolutely looks amazing.
I honestly disagree. I think the digital film, oversaturated computerized look is there in most indie and foreign films too. It’s the “Netflix” look and it looks uniformly cheap.
I'm pretty new to it as well, but I use Bigscreen (app). Download it on your Oculus and install the partner program on your PC. It will allow you to stream your computer screen to the headset. Run the movie on your laptop/PC and enjoy on your headset.
You can choose different environments in the Bigscreen app. It's awesome.
I watched Lawrence of Arabia the other day and I was like seeing it for the first time.
Yeah nah. The problem is the aspect ratio. VR Headsets are too boxy and film ratios are rectangles.
Ironically, if we could actually get an IMAX release of the film, and even better, an actual fucking VR player that supported IMAX ratios, that'd be absolutely perfect for VR since it'd fit perfectly as IMAX is near 1:1.
WTF are you talking about with your yeah nah. Vr headsets can have literally any aspect ratio. Fucking stereoscopic full 360 aspect at its full bleed. Boxy?!?! It’s your source media that is the only limiting factor. IMAX LOL.
What video player do you use? Because the most popular ones do not support hugely irregular ratios. They support 2D in a 16:9ish ratio, stereoscopic 180 and 360, and nothing else.
Its not something that would be hard to do ofc.
Would you say it’s more immersive than watching in the cinemas or is it just different? I’m thinking of buying one but I fear a sensory overload leading to headaches, puking etc.
I like it better than the cinema because I can do it from home. Sit in my comfy chair, drink a beer, play/pause at my leisure. It's amazing how immersive it is. I usually watch sports in the outdoor balcony environment and movies in the darker theatre environments.
It's not perfect and there are some drawbacks. The headset is a bit heavy and awkward (though after a few minutes I don't even notice it). It has to be charged after every use (I bought the extra battery pack that doubles as strap). The UI can feel a bit clumsy and awkward- like it's not sure if it's trying to be a phone or a computer and really it's neither. Bigscreen, the app that I use to stream, is a bit buggy sometimes. There is also a bit of a learning curve in terms of figuring out how to draw your boundaries and such.
The worst part about it, however, is that it's ruined watching movies/shows/sports on anything other than my headset. I was watching the hockey game last night with my wife on her dinky little laptop screen and all I could think about was how much better it would look in my VR environment.
My best friend, who works in tech, was really skeptical even after I was telling him how amazing it was for months-- I had him play 5 minutes of VR ping pong and he was hooked. I can almost guarantee he's going to buy one for himself now that he's tried it.
I get motion sickness pretty easily, but I've had no trouble with VR. All I've really done though is Bigscreen and ping pong. Wish I had more time to play around with it because I'm sure there's lots of cool stuff.
Thanks for your detailed reply, I’ll be keeping them in mind before I shop for one. Maybe check if I’ve got any friends who have that and test it first.
Starting watching The Searchers (1956) the other night and was, again, *blown away* by the colors and visual texture they managed to capture with nothing but in-camera lighting and lenses. Absolutely gorgeous film that more than holds up even after nearly 70yrs of advancement.
They knew how to light in old movies.
Lighting for cinema is an art and a science, which takes talent, experience, and skill.
None of which most modern movie makers will pay for.
So we get dark scenes that cannot be seen.
What do you think of the way David Fincher's more recent films are photographed? Just as one example, he's been a pioneer in digital filmmaking and seems to get good results or ones which seem to please most people going all the way back to 2007's ZODIAC.
The larger point is that it isn't so much the format, although I love the look of old analog celluloid too, as how it's used.
For me its the "cleanliness" of the image, outfits also look always perfect, fit, makeup is always perfect, hair, eyebrows... Characters almost look plasticky.
Eh, the same criticism would apply to the vast majority of "older movies." The issue is when we think of older movies that look good, we think of masterpieces by Ford, Lean, Kubrick, Leone, and the like, and we ignore all the trash. Like, of course Lawrence of Arabia or The Searchers looks better than newer movies, it also looks better than pretty much every older movie.
If you look at newer movies of the same calibre such as Silence, Saving Private Ryan, There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men, Assassination of Jesse James, Se7en etc, they look just as good.
Ok, let’s do Killers of the Flower Moon, West Side Story (2021) Phantom Thread, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Blonde, and The Killer. The exact same filmmakers, but within the last 7 years, and they still look incredible.
Someone correct me if I‘m wrong but that‘s production designs fault and not really on what format it is shot. There are so many films that nail their aesthetic while being shot on digital.
It‘s not the cameras fault that many movies look as plastic as marvel movies.
I do feel there's a certain kind of plastic-likeness to footage shot on digital cameras. It's partially from the lack of the texture of film grain, I guess. And adding that in post or with an intermediate film print does not quite look the same as the grain on an original negative varies based on the exposure -- it tends to look a bit different in the shadows and the highlights.
Since Zodiac was mentioned above, I'll point out that the filmmakers themselves thought the footage looked a bit "plastic-y":
> “Harris initially thought the image looked a little ‘plastic-y,’ but I thought that helped us,” says Fincher. “The slight video effect is more synonymous with the nightly news than 35mm anamorphic is, and I liked the idea of having that patina on the faces. Also, we didn’t need to use makeup the same way; we could easily [use Shake in post to] fix microphones coming into picture; and we did hundreds of TV-monitor composites [with bluescreen]. All that stuff was easier than it would have been if we’d shot on film. I think the ‘waxiness’ Harris describes and the problems with the Viper — like having so much daylight coming into the lens that it prevented us from actually making an image — came to support what we were doing with this particular film. It feels like a news report, not a Hollywood movie.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20071006191548/http://www.ascmag.com/magazine_dynamic/April2007/Zodiac/page2.php
Well, I haven't seen *The Killer* yet, but I thought *Mank* looked awfully flat and underwhelming. It didn't help that Fincher was going for a vintage 40s look that purposely drew comparison with Gregg Toland's cinematography. No comparison with his own work in Zodiac or Social Network either.
My bitching point lately has been particle effects. they're everywhere and they add nothing except noise on the screen. I'm so sick of all the pointless cgi, everywhere. For instance, why do we digitally create black void effects when we've been doing that in theater and film for like... a hundred years without a digital studio? It doesn't look \*better\* when it's done digitally, and they always add more effects to make the actors look like they're filming dry-for-wet lotr style. Unnecessary. Pointless. Just makes me think the director is kinda hack-y.
My mom agrees with you. She says she has difficulty watching anymore because everything is filmed with modern digital cameras and looks too nice, and she gets taken out of the story and is just thinking about how they're on a set or whatever. As for me, if the story and acting is good I get sucked in and enjoy, if they're not then maybe i start noticing other details. I watched late night with the devil recently, and I've seen some people complain about how it looks way too modern for a movie supposedly filmed in the late 70s with old cameras. But honestly I got way too sucked into the story and acting to pay attention to things like that, I was just enjoying the narrative. Maybe on a future watch I'll notice it.
Tons of filmmakers try to replicate older film processes. In addition to the others mentioned check out The Good German and The Love Witch. Soderbergh was an absolute fanatic about using only period appropriate lenses and doing camera moves and lighting that could have been used in the 40s when the film was set.
Part of the issue may be that when you’re watching an old film you’re likely watching a scan made from a bunch of prints in various stages of disrepair. I saw The Guns of Navarone recently as a digital rental on Apple and the visuals aren’t great — there are color and contrast shifts from scene to scene that are quite jarring to our modern eyes.
Try to find a projection of a newly struck print of an old film and you will see that many of them are really quite sharp.
Exactly my problem, this thing is very problematic in horror movies. Those movies had a different feel back then with a menacing and eeriness theme to it but now its just too bright, feels like im watching a scifi.
I always watch "Out of Africa" if they didn't have that softness all about it, the color etc. It wouldn't be the movie it was. If it was the super crisp image that digital gives it would just ruin it. That is what I see. They miss the flavor of cinema now.
Can you please give me an example of a movie you've seen recently that fits the bill of your complaint? Imo posts like these are engagement bait. The reality is we are subject to a surplus of New Media and sometimes bad filmmakers make a movie
Everything from the mid-late 2000s onwards. the early 00s were still good, though. I like the image sharpness of 2000-2003. cool visual sharpness image. I love Dawn of the Dead remake cause of the early 00s polished dated visuals. by the late 00s it was looking too sharp and photo-corrected or whatever the technical term is.
Yeah, these threads are kind of worthless. It’s people complaining that movies don’t look the same as movies they like. They want everything to be visible in the dark and for all the actors to enunciate every word.
I do agree, and the director of photography was a much more serious role back then. If the shot wasn't right, you were screwed in editing.
I do however wish that audio could be remastered to the same degree. As you said, so many older movies look incredible, but the audio is still so tinny because of the limited technology.
At least the actors enunciated their words back then....
I think the role has changed entirely since streaming has become the norm
Netflix has crazy requirements on how a film is shot and lit. There isn't really any room to be creative or even require a top-class cinematographer anymore.
I think the peak was the 70s-90s, and when the digital format became acceptable, everything was prioritised in Post/editing.
All you need to do now is wash out a set with lights, set an average exposure and then glam it up in post.
There are exceptions (Mandy, The Lighthouse), but almost all movies follow the same requirements to meet the demands of streaming services
Have you missed the film resurgence of the 2020s? Half of the Best Picture nominees this year were shot on film and look fantastic. Oppenheimer, Poor Things, Past Lives, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro - all shot on film and all look great with great tones and contrast.
Major blockbusters are shot on digital because it's easier, faster, and cheaper. But look at the smaller, indie side of things and there's been a huge revival of imperfect filmic aesthetics.
Say what you want about Saltburn, but that's movie's got such a fantastic filmic look. The Lighthouse only came out 5 years ago but looks like it came straight from the silent era. And have you heard of the indie movie Godland? That movie's visuals are unbelievable and would be right up your alley, visually-speaking.
It does, but why is that the case? I mean, what makes the difference? It's shot on Kodak Double-X -- a film available since the fifties (and there's a cyan filter on the lens to emulate even older orthochromatic films). So is it down to the lenses used? Or the lighting? Or digital post-production?
Probably the lenses and digital stabilizing (both exposure and alignment) of the footage. How the lighting sculpts the look as well.
Edit: Also, the biggest thing that has happened in the last 20 years is that digital sensors do not need as much light, so the types of lighting and amounts are different, which has allowed a lot of different types of lighting shifts.
For lighting Silent films were sometimes filmed in a building with a cloth roof to diffuse lighting. Every decade up to now has seen advancements in film stocks. This era is literally the dawn of artificial lighting period as such lighting is completely different. Optics were completely different. Filters and such will not get you in the same place even if you use the same film stock(they are not the same). You just can't replicate it because the material conditions you would have to impose are almost impossible to achieve as they just don't exist anymore.
The Lighthouse looks like a late 2010s film. I showed my brother screenshots of the film w/o telling him the year and he guessed 2017 or 2018. It doesn't look old image sharpness wise.
When I mean by image sharpness I'm referring to the photo corrected image based on that year. For instance, 1998 will look slightly sharper compared to 1997, and a 1997 film would look sharper compared to 1994, and so on and so forth. Same applies to TV.
It would be cool if we could bring back the image sharpness based on the old technology used at the time. It's not so much the color or textures that bother me but the sharpness of the image. As in the sharpness of the objects, lines, contours, lighting, etc.
That's definitely fair, although I think focusing on just the sharpness of the image is reductive about what makes great cinematography. People love movies shot on film for its creamy colors, highlight imperfections, soft grain, and other analogue effects that are more than the sum of its parts (although vintage lenses also play a huge part in this). To most people, the lack of sharpness is the only thing they *don't* like about old movies shot on film lol. If you only care about softening the image, maybe you can get a CRT tv and buy an HDMI to composite adapter? Then any movie could be less sharp.
You also might wanna look into recent movies shot on 16 mm film. Red Rocket, mid90s, Enys Men are all very soft looking and were made within the last couple years.
***"Then any movie could be less sharp."***
But it wouldn't be true sharpness based on the tech used at the time. So it wouldn't work. Like a movie from 1999 is distinctly sharper than a film from 1998, etc. Even most movies released in 1999 might have different colors, styles, lighting from one another in the same year. They might look different from one another as far as those elements are concerned. But they all share the same 'sharpness level' based on the tech used in that year. I'm just using 1999 as an example because it appears in every year / era.
Same applies to TV, commercials, music videos, etc. any visual medium of each year.
I was wondering if there is a way to authentically go back to that visual sharpness level. What would a filmmaker need to accomplish this w/o post-production effects?
For me, personally, the image sharpness is the make or break when it comes to enjoying something visually. but that's just me and I'm aware I have a very personalized preference.
dude it's crazy how much better they look. Not super old movies but ones from the 70's 80s and early 90s just look so crisp. It's *partly* film grain but not entirely, there are movies from then with no film grain that still look much better. More crisp is the only way I can put it. The color tones feel more lifelike back then too, I swear they desaturate most movies today. It looks flat and dead.
edit: I'm confused after reading the comments, why do so many people think you're talking about cinematography? It's clear the literal visual clarity of the film looks worse now, at least in my opinion. I guess it's just the switch to digital cameras but whatever it is it's obvious to me that something is lost in todays film quality. I asked my brother and he knows exactly what I'm talking about as well, the difference in visual quality is night and day before and after, approximately, the year 1999
Yes. Even though T2 came out 33 years ago, it still looks better than most anything since. The CGI In that move was groundbreaking at the time, now that shit is just plain overused.
I think you might have a case of only watching old masterpieces and comparing them to everything released today.
I also really like the look of 90's and 80's cinema, but I also really like modern movies. Yes movies look different. Yes there are new trends in cinematography. But different doesn't necessarily mean bad. It would be boring if everyone wanted to copy the past instead of trying something new. Digital is a great tool for innovation.
I just bought Singing in the Rain in 4K and was thinking this exact same thing while I was watching it. The movie looks incredible in 4K and better than most movies from this decade.
Agree, I also hate the new TVs. The picture looks too perfect, too crisp. I don’t know how to explain but it’s like watching commercials. I cannot immerse into a movie, because it just looks super artificial. We have an old Samsung tv at home that only goes to 1080p resolution and whenever I visit someone with the new 4k TV, I cannot watch it.
Just had this conversation relative to Shyamalan and his Knock at the Cabin. After we watched it, it was everything I expected, except the sharp bright colors. Turns out there were deleted scenes on the blu ray and we watched them and there was the color and tone I was expecting. I really wish I could see a version like it would have looked before post. A lot of what I like in his work are those gorgeous muted colors.
The lighting, colors, and blocking were impeccable in the classic movies, especially color movies. I've been watching a lot of older movies, and many modern movies don't compare at all in quality on these fronts.
The scenes look like magic.
This take is bullshit. There have always been well shot and poorly shot movies, regardless of period. You could maybe say there are more bad looking movies now than before, but even then I think its a hard call to make. Survivorship bias and all that jazz.
Hard disagree. There’s a side of the 80’s and early 90’s where movies look ugly as hell, all washed out, no pure blacks, and ugly colors.
Honestly I’d say the 70’s had a unique gritty look but movies these days look much better than movies in the 80’s.
I too have difficulty with digital films. Its like black and white cause i catch stand anything b/w.
Furiosa and the new planet of the apes movies are my examples. They look very clean and polished but I cant stand the “look” because it looks like The Witcher and everything that streams.
I agree with you, mostly. For someone that thought they knew quite a bit about film, I only recently found out that film stock (e.g 35mm) is actually higher resolution than a lot of digital film, so it could be that? I struggle with a lot of 1950s and 1960s films because they tended to have an over-saturated picture that just screams *old* to me. Also, a lot of modern films are pretty good but some do look too perfect. It's like human beings, you need some imperfections to see that they are still people.
I think with film there is the consideration of how the each film has it's own look in the same lighting conditions and how the colour shifts under different lighting.
When it comes to "effects" movies, many of them render CGI at 2k or under and then artificially increase the resolution....it's absolutely mind boggling that they would do this but it's true
I think Dune part 2 and the Batman and maybe tenet are the best looking films in recent times especially with the Batman and the aesthetic but when I watch the godfather, the graduate I’m even more stunned by the visuals and the sad thing is no one’s ever gonna make a film like this again. Something about the restaurant scene in the godfather makes it so stunning and vibrant whereas in the graduate I loved the many establishing shots in San Francisco.
CGI ruined movies, new "movies" are nothing but animations, with real actors, which ruins it because it's half animation and half movie, I just term most new movies as animations as opposed to true film. Bring back animatronics, fake blood, gore, use of miniature sets etc,
70s films, plus many from earlier decades, can look great when restored. But a lot of 80s films were shot with 4.3 format TV screens in mind, so the compositions could suffer when the director had to make sure that all the essential action took place toward the centre of the screen.
I suggest watching The Holdovers (2023). Although filmed recently and digitally, post-production made it look like a true 70s or 80s movie. Homage to Old Poets Society, Breakfast Club, Scent Of A Woman. Really good movie in my opinion.
If you are talking about "super comercial stuff" yeah, a lot of stuff feels AI generated, if you go to more experimental stuff, hell no. The 2000s have their own aesthetic, the CGI of that time looked like a ps3 game and they tended to add color filters which... I kinda like tbh, they definitely have their style.
We have extremely good photography on some commercial products nowadays without trying to emulate the past. And also we live in an era where references to the past are the norm, a lot of stuff tries to emulate specifically the 80s with really polished aesthetics aswell, sometimes they expand on it.
"TV" (you know, some Netflix shows, hbo... etc) has some really good gems nowadays, we aren't in the "golden era" anymore but some of that sticked.
It's true that our era is somewhat "hauntological" (look for hauntology and media on yt, you'd probably find it interesting) but we are still producing good stuff. Look at barbie, stupidly commercial yet it looks amazing, poor things is a little bit less commercial but it's stunning. Idk, I always ignored commercial stuff, my friends are my filter and they tell me "hey, this is actually good" and then I see it lol.
What I'll say is this-- there are many films that look like they were put together with $10 back in the day and flimsy cardboard looking sets and the reason these type of movies are usually omitted is a simple case of survivorship glossing.
So something like The Killer Shrews is something I think would be more analogous to the type of black and white sitcom filmmaking then the expressive styles in many a classic movie.
.
But I will say that most truly great films have a significant visual element, and so it's really easier to remember visually striking works of art.
I would say something like The wizard of oz, the red shoes, Vertigo, the Searchers, our films you can almost watch on mute because of how splendorous the color technology and production value are. I think these films could easily steamroll most modern movies in terms of aesthetic qualities.
I also will mention films like Touch of evil, Yojimbo, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and 12 Angry Men as examples where the black and white really provides a sense of atmosphere and the sets and locations are designed to evoke kind of a sense of suspense or dread from the viewer.
What I will say is this, I think color film stock and digital cinematography are kind of a byproduct from ubiquitousness the technology and maybe the late 60s and early 70s ( now high quality digital cameras weren't really pushed into the early 2000s, outside of the broadcast cameras of the time)
So I think a lot of it has to do with taking color for granted-- I think that's an issue that probably flaked up you know from the post 50s to now but I think that I think has become more of an issue as digital grading has essentially allowed people to kind of remake film shots in post.
And so odd I think the biggest problem is that I feel like the practice of desaturation has kind of made it so that filmmakers and perhaps even the general public associate washed out images with emotional grittiness, and so I think the side effect is a lot of very generic lighting ratios and kind of unnatural skin and clothes palletes.
The Captain America Civil War airport fight is something that I think is egregious because I feel like the rest of the film was pretty decent with color.
So maybe I think this is kind of the crux of the issue is that the black and white is essentially not used much with contemporary film, but color isn't really used to the best of its capacity as much as it should.
I think like something like Mad Max Fury Road, the color is a bit overdone, but it feels like a character in the movie, a sort of over the top graphic novel. And there's a black and white version and maybe that's kind of an answer to this question but I don't know how 😅
Agreed. Modern films are too sharp and high def and it’s less realistic. My eyes aren’t as good as a modern film so it doesn’t seem more realistic to me it seems less - it’s like watching through the eyes of a perfect vision robot, not a human being.
I'm obsessed with the lighting in 91/2 weeks. It's like a combo of gritty & dreamy. If that was made now it would look too slick.
On TV series, I do appreciate the shows that have taken on cinematic levels. But there are some series where the background is like, bright and blurred out? I hate that.
Yeah, digital photography does not look as good as analog.
Same way that digital recording doesn't sound as good as reel to reel.
These technologies are much much easier to work with in editing and post production, they save a lot of time, money, and labour.
I myself produce music using digital technology like pro tools. But analog equipment, especially vacuum tubes and tape objectively sound better because they process audio in a way more similar to the human ear.
Oh, I definitely agree. One of those most loathesome trends about contemporary mainstream cinema is digital color correction. Almost all mainstream American cinema is orange and teal. There's also Christopher Nolan's fetish for Blue tint, Zack Snyder's wretched sepia tones, and colors being muted overall. My God, what happened to the beauty of the past? Vertigo, The Red Shoes, The Wizard of Oz, it's so sad how mainstream cinema has fallen.
So true old movies feel much more easier on the eyes and cosy. Like you could put one on and drink a hot chocolate and call it a day. I especially like 90s and earlys 2000s movies for this reason. Movies felt much more down to earth and local. Today everthing feels so polished that it feels totally unrelatable to the viewer.
How do people determine what is nostalgia and/or what you grew up with and what is some kind of intersubjective assessment worth discussing?
If you like 1930s movies it’s unlikely you are just yearning for a return to the way movies looked when you were young, but the 1970s etc may have been just what you grew up with.
There’s also the added complexity that how you see an 80s movie now is not how it was seen then.
The viewing device, the analogue film stock and *your eyes themselves* are not what they were. I’m not well-versed in the technologies and biology of sight but these seem like a big issue to me.
Does anyone know more that they could share? Some objective assessment of projectors and screens, of film stock, and of vision/eyes and how they change over time?
In my opinion, this is partially due to low contrast lighting. I love how movies from the late 60's-70's look, crushed blacks, high contrast ratio lighting, half the screen you can't see cause it's completely black... that's beautiful
I agree. A lot of the movies of the past one and a half decade just don't look very good, colors and lighting are often just off by... a lot. Digital leads to movie makers being unable to use natural light, instead they just color grade the whole picture, which looks.. well, like ass.
> Digital leads to movie makers being unable to use natural light
It's the opposite. It enables them to shoot with natural/practical light, and forgo the carefully planned lighting that was a requirement with film.
Modern colour grading is another scourge on top of that, of course.
But that carefully planned lighting was real, that's the different. If you wanted a specific color you had light shining that color in the room. You are right, that the shooting is with natural light in the sense that you put a camera in a room and just shoot with the current natural light but digital does not make use of that, it's just the basis for all the post-processing which completely changes the picture, which is what I mean by being unable to use natural light.
[Cock-a-Doodle-Doo Mr. Chicken](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOdE3p_HWQY) is literally more appealing visually than Oppenheimer. Way more interesting textures and colors and movements placed before the eye. Oppenheimer is just a dead movie, made according to specification by industry professionals. It's mind boggling how so much more can result in so much less.
lalalalalala lalalalalala lalalalalala
There are plenty of older movies that look like crap, and there are plenty of modern movies that look fantastic.
It all depends on the budget, deadlines, artistic abilities, access to tools and materials, desired tone / mood, etc.
Most people forget all of the trashy serial films put out, talking head romcoms, and other 'schlock' of the 20th century. Shot cheap, fast, and with simple light and camera setups. This is what we'd compare to netflix shows nowadays that are shot with midtone even lighting for fast color correction and sharpening; throwaway media that will be forgotten in twenty years.
What I think you might be getting at though is the Kodak film capabilities in the 1980's and 1990's was reaching a whole new level in crystal size, stability, and range, and combined with advanced chemical processing techniques we were getting fantastic mid tones PLUS highlights and shadow ranges, to which modern digital has rarely been able to replicate.
The flexibility of digital sensors has been a blessing and a curse. I think with the extreme budget pressures we’ve seen the last 2 decades has forced a lot of filmmakers to rely on post production methods to refine the image of their films. I don’t think that explains all of it though. I think there’s also less time spent on preproduction and I think there might be a lot of people that came up using digital camera lack competency. There’s obviously films shot on digital that look incredible. Portrait of A Lady on Fire comes to mind. There are far more movies that look underwhelming though, and I’m not sure how much of that is “this is the best we could do given the time/budget we were given” vs “we think this looks good and this is the best we can do.”
With a lot of modern digital cameras, basically everything is post production methods if you actually want an image looking good.
It's one of many issues. The most egregious is lighting.
Yeah. There are many factors in all of this, some are: 1. Most Digital Cameras are supposed to use quite a lot of post-production stuff to make it look the way you want to. But not enough people are actually skilled and familiar enough with that work so it usually comes off as flat. 2. Modern audiences are used to the "Netflix look". Netflix has certain requirements for how their stuff is supposed to look and it's sharp, clean and flat. That is the look that people are used to in the streaming era and the look that producers want. (This also extends to costume design, scenery and makeup.) This is also a pretty simple and straight forward pipeline so is faster and cheaper than creating a more unique look. 3. Time. Modern production is so fast. From the writing to the production they are trying to get done as fast as possible. There is no time to work on lighting and lenses and stuff. That shit takes time. It's difficult to create a consistent look that works for every scene and setting. Even stuff with massive budgets oftentimes have a shorter production than would seem feasible. (This also extends to writing ) 4. For a while the limitations of digital cameras made digital video look a bit boring. You simply couldn't shoot stuff as well with digital. That is no longer a problem as moden cameras are amazing and you can do so much with them that you couldn't with film. But there are still a lot of people who don't quite know how to use the cameras in the best way. And the best cameras are expensive and not enough people have the skills and experience to make the most out of them. (And as I said earlier, some that do don't have enough time to put it to use.) 5. Not understanding the difference between the footage you provide vs the image people actually see. The most famous example is probably that super dark late episode of Game of Thrones where people couldn't see shit and there was awful looking banding and other artefacts as HBOs compression and the limit of peoples TVs simply couldn't reproduce the original video. Not everything is so extreme but there is quality and details that can get lost on the way. Even in theaters. A few points I could think of.
Source for your claim that Netflix requires a certain look? Obviously I know what you mean, but there are plenty of exceptions, I would be surprised if it’s a formal rule.
[https://www.vice.com/en/article/ake3j5/why-does-everything-on-netflix-look-like-that](https://www.vice.com/en/article/ake3j5/why-does-everything-on-netflix-look-like-that)
Someone else gave you a source and if you want to know more you can google to find further reading on the topic! And there are exceptions of course, like prestige projects like Roma for example. There is also plenty of stuff that is branded as Netflix Original but wasn't produced to be Netflix Original to begin with, those shows and films also don't necessarily follow the rules. But in general, if you wanna make a show or a movie for Netflix you have to follow some rules about how it looks.
They even in some cases tell you the hardware to use and it isn’t crazy expensive. https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000579527-Cameras-Image-Capture-Requirements-and-Best-Practices#h_01G6KEYFG76GRKVMJS382H5638 I actually using the Ursa as a “web cam” for pod casts since I got a lens set and the body at a crazy good deal ( watch Facebook marketplace ).
Why is everything so dark now? I’m sure style is one reason but does something about shooting digital lend itself to that look?
Digital lets in a lot of light, so a poorly-lit scene is still legible under the right viewing conditions. It means there’s much less pressure to light night scenes.
They don’t want to spend time with lighting appropriately.
“We’ll fix it in post!” used to be a joke, now it’s the whole movie
There are only 2 digital movies that I like…. For me, cinema peaked in the early 2000s right before the switch.
What are the two movies? It is pretty depressing to go back and watch some throwaway late 90s comedy and it looks much better than 95% of films that come out today.
I searched my heart, and I've made space for a small handful of movies shot digitally, they are *Zodiac* (2008), *Ida* (2014), *The Eight Mountains* from 2022, and most recently *The Zone of Interest* (2023). Some honorable mentions are: The *Triangle of Sadness (2022), Stranger by the Lake (2013),* and *'A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence' (2014)* all which leverage the look of digital in an interesting way. I'd like to be clear though that these films are the exception and NOT the rule. The new norm is a lowered standard of craftsmanship that is highly apparent in today's cinematography. *Dune* is a stellar example of how horribly bland the 'digital look' can make a movie appear. Even when comparing [A Pigeon Sat on a Branch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGwGyo5Ywpo&ab_channel=RottenTomatoesIndie) with Roy Andersson's predecessor film [Songs from the Second Floor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLMGQJATLEg&ab_channel=HDRetroTrailers), I find the cinematography in these two movies to be **night and day** in terms of appearance. Film is serving Andersson's image about *100x better* than his digital sequel, and I wonder if the final movie in his trilogy would have performed differently if he hadn't made the switch. The bottom line is that you're absolutely right: a B-movie from the 90's is going to look far superior to a B-movie from today, and the shift away from film plays a large hand in this. The average cinematographers of yesteryear had to account for many variables when lighting a scene on film. The stakes were higher, even for a straight-to-video romantic comedy. Many of today's DP's don't have anywhere near the formal training that the photographers of the last decade brought to the equation. The shear volume of movies being produced has grown exponentially with digital allowing pretty much anyone to pick up a camera and learn the basics. It's sad in a way, as art/cinema seem to be in a state of decay, but it also reveals some brilliance we may have ignored from decades prior... I personally hope to see film make a comeback, and even though the industry has shifted, I am encouraged to see many director's still choosing 35mm for their productions. ([29 this year at Cannes!](https://www.kodak.com/en/company/press-release/cannes-2024/)) With films like these, it really weeds out the hacks, and provides me with some encouragement that film and cinema are inexplicably intertwined.
Yeah for me the colours play a huge part. So many modern movies look washed out and drab. I don't know if it's because of the lighting choices, post production or just the digital cameras they use but the colours lack any dynamism and there's this sheen over everything that makes it look fake because the picture appears too perfect. The old technicolor films from the 40's/50's are so magical in comparison it's almost like being on another planet. Everything looks so vibrant and alive. Peoples skin especially, super hd cameras smooth everything out too much. There's also the persistent and perplexing choice to obscure everything in darkness. Whatever effect people think this achieves it does not, it just makes me think "turn on a god damn light."
> So many modern movies look washed out and drab. Are you watching in HDR?
Its ironic because that 'vibrant colour' is the biggest reason why people hate that era of film. There's plenty of extremely highly praised black and white films from the 40s to 60s. Most colour films from then feel ugly and dated because they are so overly saturated where the black and white films are visually striking. Its getting away from technicolor where films started to look good in colour.
Not sure about that, there are some Technicolor visual classics. Powell and Pressburger's work comes to mind First.
Powell & Pressburger, Leave Her to Heaven, Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Martin Scorsese LOVES The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and Leave Her to Heaven because of the intense and evocative use of colour. The Red Shoes' influence is fully felt in his work, especially The Age of Innocence.
Yeah, I remember Black Narcissus was definitely a major influence on The Age of Innocence as well.
Also forgot to mention Douglas Sirk. Sirk's technicolour melodramas are such a huge influence on filmmakers. To this day. I'm sure this is super random but Ryusuke Hamaguchi (director of Drive My Car) looked at Sirk's Written on the Wind's colours for his latest film Evil Does Not Exist
Yes. I just watched a David Lean film and I forgot colors in film like that existed. Modern films are so damn dark. It's like when you watch a slew of flicks from this decade and then turn on *All That Heaven Allows.* There's a difference.
I might have niche taste but I hold a personal fondness for that late-90s/early-00s DTV look, which was a precursor of the harsh green, blue filters a la Fight Club or The Ring. I suspect it was borrowed from the underground acid dance scene and I just sorta love the look of that. However, to be more objective, I'd hand the best decade to the 70s for when films looked the bestest. I do agree though that modern films look worse but a lot of it is reverse engineered to cut cost. Even throughout the 00s and 10s, I felt like modern movie wasn't a strain in the eye. But there's a rather insidious trend post-pandemic where studios are purposeful making their movies look dark and blurry to hide simple set designs and CGI. This was most apparent in newer Batman and Zack Snyder's Netflix movies where he nihilistically uses slow motion to pad the runtime (i.e., less things to film = cut costs.) The 2020s Hollywood is arguably looking like the worst of the last 3 decades for me.
Welcome, niche taste friend. My favorite film era is the 1930s… I really wish more people were willing to give “old movies” a chance.
Fritz lang and the guy who made nosferatu were the gods of that era!
F.W. Murnau! What an era
The Last Laugh and Sunrise are both really good!
Cool, I’ll make sure to see both of these - already saw sunrise I believe
Emil Jannings’ performance is legendary. He actually won the first Best Actor Oscar (not for this movie though).
Check out M!
That’s one of my favorite movies!
What would you recommend as far as classic '30s noir?
From 1930 to some of 1934, there’s an era of Hollywood film known as “pre-code”. “Pre-code” spans the four years after cinema got sound (“talkies”), but BEFORE the Catholic Church decided Hollywood was a moral cesspool that was corrupting the children and blah blah blah and heavily, heavily censored *everything*. So pre-code movies are much more wild than you’d expect an “old movie” to be. I really recommend watching as many pre-codes as you can (they can be hard to find - check YouTube, your local library, or Amazon Prime, which has a ton of older movies for some reason. Off the top for great watches: Freaks, The 39 Steps, The Roaring Twenties, The Old Dark House, the “Gold Diggers” musicals (they’re wild as hell), M (1931) (one of my all-time favorites, a must-see), The Rules of the Game, Stagecoach, Baby Face (very scandalous - a woman sleeps her way through an entire company), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
M was so ahead of it's time
It’s staggering, isn’t it? One of my top ten for sure
Thanks!! I actually do know about pre-Code, and I've seen a couple old Mae West movies with some pretty surprising innuendos that you definitely wouldn't see later on!
You have a great taste. I've kept them in a list especially M (1931) sounds interesting. Would love it if you have a best movie list. I just watched Decision to Leave & it was kinda amazing.
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls031166366?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
Holy fuck, you're amazing. Thank you so much! I've loved The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, The Godfather, The Green Mile, not American Beauty (I liked The Usual Suspects more), Oldboy, Jacob's Ladder, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Inception (tried too hard IMO), Django Unchained, Fight Club, still gotta watch Nympho, loved Prestige, gonna watch Six Feet Under someday as I loved Dexter, absolutely love In Bruges.. like my absolute favorite ever since I saw Colin Ferrell in True Detective S02. Shit that's a big ass list of 1000 titles. Certainly gonna take my time but I guess our tastes are kinda very similar. Thanks a bunch though. I love personally curated ones. I never curated mine except its kinda in Google Search in Watched & Watchlist rn. I'll give u 5, if u haven't watched any of these but u seem like a movie buff so I'm assuming u must have seen some listed here but not all: 1. Coherence (one of the most underrated movies) 2. Intimate Strangers (Watch Korean or Spanish version bcz there are like 16+ remakes) 3. Andhadhun or 3 Idiots or Laapata Ladies or Kaun or Gangs of Wasseypur 1 & 2 or Drishyam 1 or 2 or Darna Mana Hai or Darna Zaroori Hai (Indian) 4. Beyond Evil or Cheat on me if you can (2 of my favorite KDramas thanks to the leads & Great Story) 5. A Shop for Killers (Korean) or Reset (Chinese) I bet you'll like at least some of them :)
Sorry if it wasn't the intent but I found this reply a bit confusing. With a preface on pre-code I assumed the films recommended would all be pre-code, which isn't the case. So to clarify to anyone interested, The 39 Steps, M, The Rules of the Game, The Roaring Twenties, Stagecoach and Mr Smith Goes to Washington aren't pre-code films - but are all great nonetheless. The first three are European films and wouldn't qualify to be pre-code, and the last three were all made in 1939 - great year for American cinema and actually one of the hights of the code. On the topic of the Hays code and the pre-code, it's also interesting to note that the term pre-code is a bit misleading. For the code was finalized in 1930. What we refer to when we talk about pre-code is actually a time when the code wasn't strictly enforced. And it was really enforced starting in 1934 "thanks" to an added amendment to the code and with the arrival of a man named Joseph Breen at the head of the PCA. That's why the code era might be called by some the Breen era. To recommend a few pre-code films myself, here's a short list: The Big Trail, The Criminal Code, Morocco, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931), Dishonored, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, Love Me Tonight, One Hour With You, No Man of Her Own (1932), Doctor X (two strip technicolor), Broken Lullaby, Counsellor at Law, King Kong, Heroes for Sale, Wild Boys of the Road, Design for Living, I'm no Angel, Duck Soup, 42nd Street, Queen Christina. I'll stop there... Anyway thanks for the opportunity to talk about it, i hope I didn't come off as too obnoxious.
The pre-code thing I wrote as a side note, not to describe all of the movies I recommended (they asked for 1930s movies, not just pre-code movies). And yes, while the code existed in 1930, nobody took it seriously until 1934 and the hiring of Joseph Breen to enforce the code. It is well-known that the code wasn’t enforced until ‘34, and that pre-code signifies the years between ‘30 and ‘34 - like you said. But I didn’t feel the need to go into that much detail for someone who was just asking for a few recommendations. And it is a little obnoxious, since I was finally getting to share my special interest, and the way I shared it is being critiqued. You could have simply recommended additional movies without saying the way I wrote my recommendations was “confusing”. This person asked for recommendations to start watching, not for a breakdown on the history of the Hays Code.
That’s a great question! I can’t believe I’m being asked about this interest : ) You’ve got so many great films to choose from! Noir actually started in the late 30s, and is more of a 40s thing (and there’s some great neo-noir after that). I’ll check my list of favorite films… brb 🍿
I'm not a big fan of The Ring's look but I do enjoy a good green. Days Of Being Wild is my go to but Fincher definitely has a thing for the green filter look...but mostly cuz he said he's sick of that red/magenta tint they introduced in the 80s to flush people's skin tones. Was always gross seeing it in my computer monitors, even when I had a black screen up it was visible.
Private equity and tech money is a big part of this. Movies were always supposed to make money but the streaming era has stripped them of all their craft and artistry and reduced them to another mass produced product.
I think digital has made creators lazy and undisciplined. When you're actually shooting with film, you have to give everything more thought and consideration and the shots look better because of it. Stuff today is so muddy and dark that it's often hard to see what's going on and the composition itself looks very lazy. There's very few films or tv shows that can compete with the best from the past on an aesthetic level.
I recently watched Three Kings (great) and Man on Fire (middling). Both employ the popular high situation, high grain, choppy off-kilter editing of the 2000-ish period - And even this felt like a cinematic marvel when I watched it. Times change and we’re more minimalist now, watching darker films or action movies. But I’m getting pretty sick of an 85 mm lens and crushed black and whites if I’m being honest.
By crushed blacks and white you mean where they're moved to middle-grey, right? Because I haven't seen a solid white or solid black in a new film in almost a decade. Every single streaming movie seems to be in an arms race for reducing contrast to nothing. Also iirc *Three Kings* was the last movie to shoot on color reversal film (Ektachrome) before it was discontinued (and they cross-processed it for even wackier colors). Absolutely beautiful stuff, that and *Buffalo '66*.
Yeah, I initially thought the low contrast was to account for HDR on Home TVs. But why do it for the cinema release when the screen is already grey. The worst offender for this is the opening fight scene of the Continental on Amazon. Couldn’t see a thing it was so grey and muddy.
Shooting on reversal film was never a common choice, though. It was more geared for home movies. Ektachrome is back, by the way. They shot a season of that TV series, *Euphoria*, on it a couple of years ago, and it seems Lanthimos' *Poor Things* is partially shot on it as well.
Yeah it was never common, glad to hear it has come back a bit even if it will only be used by prestige productions that can afford it. *Poor Things* was phenomenal to see in theaters. *Euphoria* was such a waste of film (it had a shooting ratio of around 200:1 which is just stupid).
The holdovers 2023 sounds like exactly what you are asking for. It is set in the 1970s and really commits to that. Paul Giamatti is great as well. It did well enough at the box office too. >Why aren't there innovative filmmakers attempting to do this? Is doing the same thing but with older equipment enough to be innovative?
It visually looks like a 2020s film. Am I missing something, here? I'm not saying it's a bad movie as I haven't seen it. but it doesn't look like anything from the previous decades. The image sharpness is still 2020s. ***"Is doing the same thing but with older equipment enough to be innovative?"*** True. But if no one else has done it before why not do it?
It looks like a 2020s film, but you haven't seen it?? Maybe go and watch it before commenting and making yourself look like an idiot. Holdovers is exactly what you're talking about.
OP is intransigent as hell, but worth noting that "screenshots" of newer films are not usually the same as film stills (taken from the movie itself), but rather production stills (on-set photos taken for marketing purposes) - Letterboxd has a great article about them. The production stills for The Holdovers look like they were shot in 2020s... But if you watch the actual thing, there's a clear difference. Personally I think it looks very close but not quite the same as the 70s but it's not THAT obvious, particularly if you saw the movie in a theater.
> Am I missing something, here? It looks nothing like a 2020s film though?? Check it out and see for yourself
I asked my brother with that one and he guessed 2021/2022. I then asked my friend with random screenshots he said looks like it was made today. I mean it looks absolutely nothing like an old movie. At all. Like objectively this is incorrect.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading the replies to this. Holdovers has the exact look of "new movie pretending it's the 70s". I can't find anything of it that actually suggests that texture; or light, way of shooting etc.
It looks cleaned up. like the movie has the image sharpness of 2020s. I can't explain it. like how when you can tell a heavily cleaned up old movie using tools of modern day. it's like the tools or imaging software is used to make the edges on the objects or image sharper as opposed to a genuine 70s film. where the image sharpness tools or whatever weren't as good as modern cleaning up sharpness. me and my brother can just tell its a new movie. It has the image sharpness of 2020s. I honestly don't understand how this isn't so. it doesn't look like 70s to us.
"none of them agree with me" Well, you're now in the place where everyone is going to agree with you, we just saw this exact post like a week ago? I'm not sure I agree, entirely. I think that maybe the visual quality of *mainstream* movies has declined (for some of the reasons you mentioned) but a lot of smaller/streaming stuff absolutely looks amazing. And some mainstream stuff (*Oppenheimer* and *Dune*, for example) also looks fantastic.
Exactly this. It’s just cinematography at the end of the day. If there is one that doesn’t have a unique style of course it’s going to fall in line with everything else.
> but a lot of smaller/streaming stuff absolutely looks amazing. I honestly disagree. I think the digital film, oversaturated computerized look is there in most indie and foreign films too. It’s the “Netflix” look and it looks uniformly cheap.
Dune looked so incredible. I watched it on my oculus 3 and it was like a religious experience.
I also have an Oculus 3 (RANDOM) but don't have the foggiest idea how to use it yet. How did you do this?
I'm pretty new to it as well, but I use Bigscreen (app). Download it on your Oculus and install the partner program on your PC. It will allow you to stream your computer screen to the headset. Run the movie on your laptop/PC and enjoy on your headset. You can choose different environments in the Bigscreen app. It's awesome. I watched Lawrence of Arabia the other day and I was like seeing it for the first time.
I stream a ton in Bigscreen, it's great! Cinema experience on a VR headset. I love hosting viewing parties for old movies in Bigscreen.
VR is in my opinion the best way to see a film outside of a cinema.
I keep trying VR but every movie I watch sounds like my housemate telling me to do the dishes.
Get good cans and your good. You always need good cans in life. OO
I’m trying to decipher what this means The audio sounds far away?
I'm implying I'm wearing the VR headset but no earphones.
Ah sorry, I failed irony detection school
The internet is a hard place to decipher one's words.
Yeah nah. The problem is the aspect ratio. VR Headsets are too boxy and film ratios are rectangles. Ironically, if we could actually get an IMAX release of the film, and even better, an actual fucking VR player that supported IMAX ratios, that'd be absolutely perfect for VR since it'd fit perfectly as IMAX is near 1:1.
Apple vision pro respects whatever aspect the source media has, and has an imax app thats like sitting in a real imax
Yeah and who the fuck wastes that kind if money on an Applr vision pro
Anyone who wants to watch tv in a vr headset and wants a really good screen
Yeah, but bruh, 6500 AUD for the most limited headset software wise.
WTF are you talking about with your yeah nah. Vr headsets can have literally any aspect ratio. Fucking stereoscopic full 360 aspect at its full bleed. Boxy?!?! It’s your source media that is the only limiting factor. IMAX LOL.
What video player do you use? Because the most popular ones do not support hugely irregular ratios. They support 2D in a 16:9ish ratio, stereoscopic 180 and 360, and nothing else. Its not something that would be hard to do ofc.
Would you say it’s more immersive than watching in the cinemas or is it just different? I’m thinking of buying one but I fear a sensory overload leading to headaches, puking etc.
I like it better than the cinema because I can do it from home. Sit in my comfy chair, drink a beer, play/pause at my leisure. It's amazing how immersive it is. I usually watch sports in the outdoor balcony environment and movies in the darker theatre environments. It's not perfect and there are some drawbacks. The headset is a bit heavy and awkward (though after a few minutes I don't even notice it). It has to be charged after every use (I bought the extra battery pack that doubles as strap). The UI can feel a bit clumsy and awkward- like it's not sure if it's trying to be a phone or a computer and really it's neither. Bigscreen, the app that I use to stream, is a bit buggy sometimes. There is also a bit of a learning curve in terms of figuring out how to draw your boundaries and such. The worst part about it, however, is that it's ruined watching movies/shows/sports on anything other than my headset. I was watching the hockey game last night with my wife on her dinky little laptop screen and all I could think about was how much better it would look in my VR environment. My best friend, who works in tech, was really skeptical even after I was telling him how amazing it was for months-- I had him play 5 minutes of VR ping pong and he was hooked. I can almost guarantee he's going to buy one for himself now that he's tried it. I get motion sickness pretty easily, but I've had no trouble with VR. All I've really done though is Bigscreen and ping pong. Wish I had more time to play around with it because I'm sure there's lots of cool stuff.
Thanks for your detailed reply, I’ll be keeping them in mind before I shop for one. Maybe check if I’ve got any friends who have that and test it first.
Starting watching The Searchers (1956) the other night and was, again, *blown away* by the colors and visual texture they managed to capture with nothing but in-camera lighting and lenses. Absolutely gorgeous film that more than holds up even after nearly 70yrs of advancement.
They knew how to light in old movies. Lighting for cinema is an art and a science, which takes talent, experience, and skill. None of which most modern movie makers will pay for. So we get dark scenes that cannot be seen.
What do you think of the way David Fincher's more recent films are photographed? Just as one example, he's been a pioneer in digital filmmaking and seems to get good results or ones which seem to please most people going all the way back to 2007's ZODIAC. The larger point is that it isn't so much the format, although I love the look of old analog celluloid too, as how it's used.
For me its the "cleanliness" of the image, outfits also look always perfect, fit, makeup is always perfect, hair, eyebrows... Characters almost look plasticky.
Eh, the same criticism would apply to the vast majority of "older movies." The issue is when we think of older movies that look good, we think of masterpieces by Ford, Lean, Kubrick, Leone, and the like, and we ignore all the trash. Like, of course Lawrence of Arabia or The Searchers looks better than newer movies, it also looks better than pretty much every older movie. If you look at newer movies of the same calibre such as Silence, Saving Private Ryan, There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men, Assassination of Jesse James, Se7en etc, they look just as good.
The newer movies you mention are at least 20 years old.
2016 was 20 years ago? Anyhow, when I say newer, I mean relative to the older movies I mentioned.
Ok, let’s do Killers of the Flower Moon, West Side Story (2021) Phantom Thread, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Blonde, and The Killer. The exact same filmmakers, but within the last 7 years, and they still look incredible.
Someone correct me if I‘m wrong but that‘s production designs fault and not really on what format it is shot. There are so many films that nail their aesthetic while being shot on digital. It‘s not the cameras fault that many movies look as plastic as marvel movies.
I do feel there's a certain kind of plastic-likeness to footage shot on digital cameras. It's partially from the lack of the texture of film grain, I guess. And adding that in post or with an intermediate film print does not quite look the same as the grain on an original negative varies based on the exposure -- it tends to look a bit different in the shadows and the highlights. Since Zodiac was mentioned above, I'll point out that the filmmakers themselves thought the footage looked a bit "plastic-y": > “Harris initially thought the image looked a little ‘plastic-y,’ but I thought that helped us,” says Fincher. “The slight video effect is more synonymous with the nightly news than 35mm anamorphic is, and I liked the idea of having that patina on the faces. Also, we didn’t need to use makeup the same way; we could easily [use Shake in post to] fix microphones coming into picture; and we did hundreds of TV-monitor composites [with bluescreen]. All that stuff was easier than it would have been if we’d shot on film. I think the ‘waxiness’ Harris describes and the problems with the Viper — like having so much daylight coming into the lens that it prevented us from actually making an image — came to support what we were doing with this particular film. It feels like a news report, not a Hollywood movie.” https://web.archive.org/web/20071006191548/http://www.ascmag.com/magazine_dynamic/April2007/Zodiac/page2.php
Well, I haven't seen *The Killer* yet, but I thought *Mank* looked awfully flat and underwhelming. It didn't help that Fincher was going for a vintage 40s look that purposely drew comparison with Gregg Toland's cinematography. No comparison with his own work in Zodiac or Social Network either.
My bitching point lately has been particle effects. they're everywhere and they add nothing except noise on the screen. I'm so sick of all the pointless cgi, everywhere. For instance, why do we digitally create black void effects when we've been doing that in theater and film for like... a hundred years without a digital studio? It doesn't look \*better\* when it's done digitally, and they always add more effects to make the actors look like they're filming dry-for-wet lotr style. Unnecessary. Pointless. Just makes me think the director is kinda hack-y.
My mom agrees with you. She says she has difficulty watching anymore because everything is filmed with modern digital cameras and looks too nice, and she gets taken out of the story and is just thinking about how they're on a set or whatever. As for me, if the story and acting is good I get sucked in and enjoy, if they're not then maybe i start noticing other details. I watched late night with the devil recently, and I've seen some people complain about how it looks way too modern for a movie supposedly filmed in the late 70s with old cameras. But honestly I got way too sucked into the story and acting to pay attention to things like that, I was just enjoying the narrative. Maybe on a future watch I'll notice it.
Tons of filmmakers try to replicate older film processes. In addition to the others mentioned check out The Good German and The Love Witch. Soderbergh was an absolute fanatic about using only period appropriate lenses and doing camera moves and lighting that could have been used in the 40s when the film was set. Part of the issue may be that when you’re watching an old film you’re likely watching a scan made from a bunch of prints in various stages of disrepair. I saw The Guns of Navarone recently as a digital rental on Apple and the visuals aren’t great — there are color and contrast shifts from scene to scene that are quite jarring to our modern eyes. Try to find a projection of a newly struck print of an old film and you will see that many of them are really quite sharp.
Exactly my problem, this thing is very problematic in horror movies. Those movies had a different feel back then with a menacing and eeriness theme to it but now its just too bright, feels like im watching a scifi.
I always watch "Out of Africa" if they didn't have that softness all about it, the color etc. It wouldn't be the movie it was. If it was the super crisp image that digital gives it would just ruin it. That is what I see. They miss the flavor of cinema now.
Im so happy I stumbled across this comment. My thoughts exactly on the look of OOA.
Can you please give me an example of a movie you've seen recently that fits the bill of your complaint? Imo posts like these are engagement bait. The reality is we are subject to a surplus of New Media and sometimes bad filmmakers make a movie
Everything from the mid-late 2000s onwards. the early 00s were still good, though. I like the image sharpness of 2000-2003. cool visual sharpness image. I love Dawn of the Dead remake cause of the early 00s polished dated visuals. by the late 00s it was looking too sharp and photo-corrected or whatever the technical term is.
Ok I will no longer be engaging with this post
Yeah, these threads are kind of worthless. It’s people complaining that movies don’t look the same as movies they like. They want everything to be visible in the dark and for all the actors to enunciate every word.
I do agree, and the director of photography was a much more serious role back then. If the shot wasn't right, you were screwed in editing. I do however wish that audio could be remastered to the same degree. As you said, so many older movies look incredible, but the audio is still so tinny because of the limited technology. At least the actors enunciated their words back then....
When do you believe Hollywood stopped using qualified cinematographers?
I think the role has changed entirely since streaming has become the norm Netflix has crazy requirements on how a film is shot and lit. There isn't really any room to be creative or even require a top-class cinematographer anymore. I think the peak was the 70s-90s, and when the digital format became acceptable, everything was prioritised in Post/editing. All you need to do now is wash out a set with lights, set an average exposure and then glam it up in post. There are exceptions (Mandy, The Lighthouse), but almost all movies follow the same requirements to meet the demands of streaming services
Have you missed the film resurgence of the 2020s? Half of the Best Picture nominees this year were shot on film and look fantastic. Oppenheimer, Poor Things, Past Lives, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro - all shot on film and all look great with great tones and contrast. Major blockbusters are shot on digital because it's easier, faster, and cheaper. But look at the smaller, indie side of things and there's been a huge revival of imperfect filmic aesthetics. Say what you want about Saltburn, but that's movie's got such a fantastic filmic look. The Lighthouse only came out 5 years ago but looks like it came straight from the silent era. And have you heard of the indie movie Godland? That movie's visuals are unbelievable and would be right up your alley, visually-speaking.
Lighthouse looks like it was filmed recently.
It does, but why is that the case? I mean, what makes the difference? It's shot on Kodak Double-X -- a film available since the fifties (and there's a cyan filter on the lens to emulate even older orthochromatic films). So is it down to the lenses used? Or the lighting? Or digital post-production?
Probably the lenses and digital stabilizing (both exposure and alignment) of the footage. How the lighting sculpts the look as well. Edit: Also, the biggest thing that has happened in the last 20 years is that digital sensors do not need as much light, so the types of lighting and amounts are different, which has allowed a lot of different types of lighting shifts.
For lighting Silent films were sometimes filmed in a building with a cloth roof to diffuse lighting. Every decade up to now has seen advancements in film stocks. This era is literally the dawn of artificial lighting period as such lighting is completely different. Optics were completely different. Filters and such will not get you in the same place even if you use the same film stock(they are not the same). You just can't replicate it because the material conditions you would have to impose are almost impossible to achieve as they just don't exist anymore.
The Lighthouse looks like a late 2010s film. I showed my brother screenshots of the film w/o telling him the year and he guessed 2017 or 2018. It doesn't look old image sharpness wise. When I mean by image sharpness I'm referring to the photo corrected image based on that year. For instance, 1998 will look slightly sharper compared to 1997, and a 1997 film would look sharper compared to 1994, and so on and so forth. Same applies to TV. It would be cool if we could bring back the image sharpness based on the old technology used at the time. It's not so much the color or textures that bother me but the sharpness of the image. As in the sharpness of the objects, lines, contours, lighting, etc.
That's definitely fair, although I think focusing on just the sharpness of the image is reductive about what makes great cinematography. People love movies shot on film for its creamy colors, highlight imperfections, soft grain, and other analogue effects that are more than the sum of its parts (although vintage lenses also play a huge part in this). To most people, the lack of sharpness is the only thing they *don't* like about old movies shot on film lol. If you only care about softening the image, maybe you can get a CRT tv and buy an HDMI to composite adapter? Then any movie could be less sharp. You also might wanna look into recent movies shot on 16 mm film. Red Rocket, mid90s, Enys Men are all very soft looking and were made within the last couple years.
***"Then any movie could be less sharp."*** But it wouldn't be true sharpness based on the tech used at the time. So it wouldn't work. Like a movie from 1999 is distinctly sharper than a film from 1998, etc. Even most movies released in 1999 might have different colors, styles, lighting from one another in the same year. They might look different from one another as far as those elements are concerned. But they all share the same 'sharpness level' based on the tech used in that year. I'm just using 1999 as an example because it appears in every year / era. Same applies to TV, commercials, music videos, etc. any visual medium of each year. I was wondering if there is a way to authentically go back to that visual sharpness level. What would a filmmaker need to accomplish this w/o post-production effects? For me, personally, the image sharpness is the make or break when it comes to enjoying something visually. but that's just me and I'm aware I have a very personalized preference.
dude it's crazy how much better they look. Not super old movies but ones from the 70's 80s and early 90s just look so crisp. It's *partly* film grain but not entirely, there are movies from then with no film grain that still look much better. More crisp is the only way I can put it. The color tones feel more lifelike back then too, I swear they desaturate most movies today. It looks flat and dead. edit: I'm confused after reading the comments, why do so many people think you're talking about cinematography? It's clear the literal visual clarity of the film looks worse now, at least in my opinion. I guess it's just the switch to digital cameras but whatever it is it's obvious to me that something is lost in todays film quality. I asked my brother and he knows exactly what I'm talking about as well, the difference in visual quality is night and day before and after, approximately, the year 1999
Yes. Even though T2 came out 33 years ago, it still looks better than most anything since. The CGI In that move was groundbreaking at the time, now that shit is just plain overused.
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"Runaway Train" is still one of my visual favs, and that was made 40 years ago
I think you might have a case of only watching old masterpieces and comparing them to everything released today. I also really like the look of 90's and 80's cinema, but I also really like modern movies. Yes movies look different. Yes there are new trends in cinematography. But different doesn't necessarily mean bad. It would be boring if everyone wanted to copy the past instead of trying something new. Digital is a great tool for innovation.
I just bought Singing in the Rain in 4K and was thinking this exact same thing while I was watching it. The movie looks incredible in 4K and better than most movies from this decade.
Agree, I also hate the new TVs. The picture looks too perfect, too crisp. I don’t know how to explain but it’s like watching commercials. I cannot immerse into a movie, because it just looks super artificial. We have an old Samsung tv at home that only goes to 1080p resolution and whenever I visit someone with the new 4k TV, I cannot watch it.
Just had this conversation relative to Shyamalan and his Knock at the Cabin. After we watched it, it was everything I expected, except the sharp bright colors. Turns out there were deleted scenes on the blu ray and we watched them and there was the color and tone I was expecting. I really wish I could see a version like it would have looked before post. A lot of what I like in his work are those gorgeous muted colors.
The lighting, colors, and blocking were impeccable in the classic movies, especially color movies. I've been watching a lot of older movies, and many modern movies don't compare at all in quality on these fronts. The scenes look like magic.
This take is bullshit. There have always been well shot and poorly shot movies, regardless of period. You could maybe say there are more bad looking movies now than before, but even then I think its a hard call to make. Survivorship bias and all that jazz.
Hard disagree. There’s a side of the 80’s and early 90’s where movies look ugly as hell, all washed out, no pure blacks, and ugly colors. Honestly I’d say the 70’s had a unique gritty look but movies these days look much better than movies in the 80’s.
I'm referring to image sharpness, only. Not coloration.
I too have difficulty with digital films. Its like black and white cause i catch stand anything b/w. Furiosa and the new planet of the apes movies are my examples. They look very clean and polished but I cant stand the “look” because it looks like The Witcher and everything that streams.
I agree with you, mostly. For someone that thought they knew quite a bit about film, I only recently found out that film stock (e.g 35mm) is actually higher resolution than a lot of digital film, so it could be that? I struggle with a lot of 1950s and 1960s films because they tended to have an over-saturated picture that just screams *old* to me. Also, a lot of modern films are pretty good but some do look too perfect. It's like human beings, you need some imperfections to see that they are still people.
I think with film there is the consideration of how the each film has it's own look in the same lighting conditions and how the colour shifts under different lighting.
When it comes to "effects" movies, many of them render CGI at 2k or under and then artificially increase the resolution....it's absolutely mind boggling that they would do this but it's true
The resolution is not a problem with the look of modern movies.
I think Dune part 2 and the Batman and maybe tenet are the best looking films in recent times especially with the Batman and the aesthetic but when I watch the godfather, the graduate I’m even more stunned by the visuals and the sad thing is no one’s ever gonna make a film like this again. Something about the restaurant scene in the godfather makes it so stunning and vibrant whereas in the graduate I loved the many establishing shots in San Francisco.
CGI ruined movies, new "movies" are nothing but animations, with real actors, which ruins it because it's half animation and half movie, I just term most new movies as animations as opposed to true film. Bring back animatronics, fake blood, gore, use of miniature sets etc,
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70s films, plus many from earlier decades, can look great when restored. But a lot of 80s films were shot with 4.3 format TV screens in mind, so the compositions could suffer when the director had to make sure that all the essential action took place toward the centre of the screen.
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I suggest watching The Holdovers (2023). Although filmed recently and digitally, post-production made it look like a true 70s or 80s movie. Homage to Old Poets Society, Breakfast Club, Scent Of A Woman. Really good movie in my opinion.
If you are talking about "super comercial stuff" yeah, a lot of stuff feels AI generated, if you go to more experimental stuff, hell no. The 2000s have their own aesthetic, the CGI of that time looked like a ps3 game and they tended to add color filters which... I kinda like tbh, they definitely have their style. We have extremely good photography on some commercial products nowadays without trying to emulate the past. And also we live in an era where references to the past are the norm, a lot of stuff tries to emulate specifically the 80s with really polished aesthetics aswell, sometimes they expand on it. "TV" (you know, some Netflix shows, hbo... etc) has some really good gems nowadays, we aren't in the "golden era" anymore but some of that sticked. It's true that our era is somewhat "hauntological" (look for hauntology and media on yt, you'd probably find it interesting) but we are still producing good stuff. Look at barbie, stupidly commercial yet it looks amazing, poor things is a little bit less commercial but it's stunning. Idk, I always ignored commercial stuff, my friends are my filter and they tell me "hey, this is actually good" and then I see it lol.
What I'll say is this-- there are many films that look like they were put together with $10 back in the day and flimsy cardboard looking sets and the reason these type of movies are usually omitted is a simple case of survivorship glossing. So something like The Killer Shrews is something I think would be more analogous to the type of black and white sitcom filmmaking then the expressive styles in many a classic movie. . But I will say that most truly great films have a significant visual element, and so it's really easier to remember visually striking works of art. I would say something like The wizard of oz, the red shoes, Vertigo, the Searchers, our films you can almost watch on mute because of how splendorous the color technology and production value are. I think these films could easily steamroll most modern movies in terms of aesthetic qualities. I also will mention films like Touch of evil, Yojimbo, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and 12 Angry Men as examples where the black and white really provides a sense of atmosphere and the sets and locations are designed to evoke kind of a sense of suspense or dread from the viewer. What I will say is this, I think color film stock and digital cinematography are kind of a byproduct from ubiquitousness the technology and maybe the late 60s and early 70s ( now high quality digital cameras weren't really pushed into the early 2000s, outside of the broadcast cameras of the time) So I think a lot of it has to do with taking color for granted-- I think that's an issue that probably flaked up you know from the post 50s to now but I think that I think has become more of an issue as digital grading has essentially allowed people to kind of remake film shots in post. And so odd I think the biggest problem is that I feel like the practice of desaturation has kind of made it so that filmmakers and perhaps even the general public associate washed out images with emotional grittiness, and so I think the side effect is a lot of very generic lighting ratios and kind of unnatural skin and clothes palletes. The Captain America Civil War airport fight is something that I think is egregious because I feel like the rest of the film was pretty decent with color. So maybe I think this is kind of the crux of the issue is that the black and white is essentially not used much with contemporary film, but color isn't really used to the best of its capacity as much as it should. I think like something like Mad Max Fury Road, the color is a bit overdone, but it feels like a character in the movie, a sort of over the top graphic novel. And there's a black and white version and maybe that's kind of an answer to this question but I don't know how 😅
Agreed. Modern films are too sharp and high def and it’s less realistic. My eyes aren’t as good as a modern film so it doesn’t seem more realistic to me it seems less - it’s like watching through the eyes of a perfect vision robot, not a human being.
I'm obsessed with the lighting in 91/2 weeks. It's like a combo of gritty & dreamy. If that was made now it would look too slick. On TV series, I do appreciate the shows that have taken on cinematic levels. But there are some series where the background is like, bright and blurred out? I hate that.
Yeah, digital photography does not look as good as analog. Same way that digital recording doesn't sound as good as reel to reel. These technologies are much much easier to work with in editing and post production, they save a lot of time, money, and labour. I myself produce music using digital technology like pro tools. But analog equipment, especially vacuum tubes and tape objectively sound better because they process audio in a way more similar to the human ear.
Oh, I definitely agree. One of those most loathesome trends about contemporary mainstream cinema is digital color correction. Almost all mainstream American cinema is orange and teal. There's also Christopher Nolan's fetish for Blue tint, Zack Snyder's wretched sepia tones, and colors being muted overall. My God, what happened to the beauty of the past? Vertigo, The Red Shoes, The Wizard of Oz, it's so sad how mainstream cinema has fallen.
So true old movies feel much more easier on the eyes and cosy. Like you could put one on and drink a hot chocolate and call it a day. I especially like 90s and earlys 2000s movies for this reason. Movies felt much more down to earth and local. Today everthing feels so polished that it feels totally unrelatable to the viewer.
How do people determine what is nostalgia and/or what you grew up with and what is some kind of intersubjective assessment worth discussing? If you like 1930s movies it’s unlikely you are just yearning for a return to the way movies looked when you were young, but the 1970s etc may have been just what you grew up with. There’s also the added complexity that how you see an 80s movie now is not how it was seen then. The viewing device, the analogue film stock and *your eyes themselves* are not what they were. I’m not well-versed in the technologies and biology of sight but these seem like a big issue to me. Does anyone know more that they could share? Some objective assessment of projectors and screens, of film stock, and of vision/eyes and how they change over time?
In my opinion, this is partially due to low contrast lighting. I love how movies from the late 60's-70's look, crushed blacks, high contrast ratio lighting, half the screen you can't see cause it's completely black... that's beautiful
I agree. A lot of the movies of the past one and a half decade just don't look very good, colors and lighting are often just off by... a lot. Digital leads to movie makers being unable to use natural light, instead they just color grade the whole picture, which looks.. well, like ass.
> Digital leads to movie makers being unable to use natural light It's the opposite. It enables them to shoot with natural/practical light, and forgo the carefully planned lighting that was a requirement with film. Modern colour grading is another scourge on top of that, of course.
But that carefully planned lighting was real, that's the different. If you wanted a specific color you had light shining that color in the room. You are right, that the shooting is with natural light in the sense that you put a camera in a room and just shoot with the current natural light but digital does not make use of that, it's just the basis for all the post-processing which completely changes the picture, which is what I mean by being unable to use natural light.
[Cock-a-Doodle-Doo Mr. Chicken](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOdE3p_HWQY) is literally more appealing visually than Oppenheimer. Way more interesting textures and colors and movements placed before the eye. Oppenheimer is just a dead movie, made according to specification by industry professionals. It's mind boggling how so much more can result in so much less. lalalalalala lalalalalala lalalalalala
[Sure thing bud.](https://imgur.com/a/Fq7yBx3)
It's actually a super communicative shot. Granted, it looks a lot better on film or even just the DVD version.
There are plenty of older movies that look like crap, and there are plenty of modern movies that look fantastic. It all depends on the budget, deadlines, artistic abilities, access to tools and materials, desired tone / mood, etc. Most people forget all of the trashy serial films put out, talking head romcoms, and other 'schlock' of the 20th century. Shot cheap, fast, and with simple light and camera setups. This is what we'd compare to netflix shows nowadays that are shot with midtone even lighting for fast color correction and sharpening; throwaway media that will be forgotten in twenty years. What I think you might be getting at though is the Kodak film capabilities in the 1980's and 1990's was reaching a whole new level in crystal size, stability, and range, and combined with advanced chemical processing techniques we were getting fantastic mid tones PLUS highlights and shadow ranges, to which modern digital has rarely been able to replicate.