Deterioration of Visual Beauty in Film

I think it started happening already in the 1970s in the US when the more 'realistic' look took over. Visual beauty prevailed longer in Europe and Asia with the general output of artistic films being steady and beautiful all the way to the advent of digital cinematography.

While exceptions exist, a random film from 2023 looks incomparably less beautiful than a random film from 1960.

It's much harder to make a film shot on digital look beautiful than it is to make a film shot on film look beautiful, as per Pedro Costa's account. Also, many new movies are bland, with no interesting visual ideas. Even if old films didn't have interesting ideas (many did), they were still shot on film and employed nice scenography, which made them look good enough.



Nowadays, most filmmakers just don't try hard enough. I think they just don't love cinema enough, or don't take it seriously enough. They won't die of hunger if they don't make a great film, so they couldn't care less. In addition to that, most mainstream filmmakers nowadays employ super stale direction that betrays their lack of expertise in the history of the art. There are few great ideas pertaining to kineticism, shot composition, camera movement, etc., let alone NEW ideas about those. And even the few films that do stand out are ruined by the digital cinematography, which makes all that much less ravishing.

When I watch some old films, I'm flabbergasted they look so gorgeous. The shot composition is pitch-perfect, the colors vivid, and the camera movements and montage are planned to the fullest extent.



Back in the day, many auteurs WERE mainstream. They worked for huge studios and were given expert cinematographers, expert scenographers, expert composers, expert practical effects crews, etc. All of that art died with the transition to digital cinematography and CGI. That shift meant that the old experts were no longer needed. Nowadays, even the people who try to imitate the old, beautiful look fail miserably. Fincher's Mank and Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth are ugly, sorry attempts to resurrect the old visual glory. They were shot digitally - no surprise they look perfectible, fake, too clinical, and uninspired.

Most wonderful auteurs were first assistant directors to other masters, learning the art of filmmaking from the best in the field. Nowadays, budding filmmakers have no mentors to get their expertise from. They hardly ever saw anything apart from the IMDb TOP 100 and a few must-see arthouse classics they misunderstand anyway.



They have no idea how to create a good atmosphere, how to frame a shot for it to be visually splendid, or how to move the camera so that its choreography reminds you of a ballet masterpiece. They rarely ever use shadows, unusual lighting, or any interesting visual techniques. It takes a lonely director with a $1,000 budget to craft some real visual beauty that isn't fake. It takes a really dedicated one to make a good film. Very few can do it with a huge budget. Money corrupts their souls and their one-note ideas make their films redundant. If there is no beauty in them, the sheer fact they spark a discussion is simply not enough. The director could just start that discussion on a forum instead. Art has to be beautiful, even if it's ugly, abhorrent, and despicable - there has to be an element of something interesting in it. Even if it's just craftsmanship, make it good craftsmanship, not the insufferable ugliness of Nolan or the laughable ridiculousness of Gerwig.



Mainstream films used to be made by artists who happened to work in the mainstream. Nowadays, mainstream films are made by clueless hacks, mainstream directors who don't know a thing about film.

I mean, I enjoy many new films. But it's just not the same thing, man.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

Regarding the title of this thread...if anything American aka Hollywood movies of late have been all about visual beauty.

What is deteriorating or lacking is well written intelligent scripts. It seems some current directors know all about making films look visually stunning but they have to resort to story gimmicks like non sequential editing to cover their weak stories, weak world & character building. I blame that on many directors cutting their teeth on music videos in the 80s-90s and beyond. Those directors took their fast edit, flashy but voiceless films to the mainstream sparking a trend of what I call soulless film making. There has always been independents and visionaries who turn out good work, but far too few of the latter.

There's definitely some gorgeous-looking movies out there, and as I stated elsewhere, Rodrigo Prieto definitely deserved a nomination for his fantastic work lensing that Greta Gerwig movie.

As with every art form, the nature of the art that is being produced is up to the artists. It has been that way since the beginning of human civilization. One could even argue that the formats available today give a greater range of visual possibilities, with 70mm IMAX on one hand, and independent artists making movies with their iPhones on the other.

Make no mistake, the fact that you can make a decent-looking movie with nothing more than a smartphone is a huge advance. Someone who wants to become a filmmaker doesn't have to attend expensive film schools anymore, or know people in the business. They can literally take their phone out and work on their projects on-and-off until something is ready to be released to the public.

A 2015 movie shot entirely on iPhones actually premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

So, kudos to the artists who are doing whatever they can to make their visions a reality!

Yeah, I'd have to disagree, probably in multiple ways.

The one I want to highlight, though, is that there are a lot of buried, possibly unexamined assumptions in the methodology. Specifically this:

"...a random film from 2023 looks incomparably less beautiful than a random film from 1960."

This may be true. I'd actually slightly incline towards it being true, in fact! But I'm not sure this can be extrapolated from, and I don't think it implies the premise. All it necessarily implies are that there are way more cheap, thoughtless films being made, full stop. There's just more films in general, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. And maybe crap is being produced at a higher rate, because crap is easy to produce and, perhaps, the rate of masterpieces is relatively constant. I don't know. But I know there are many ways the quote above could be true that have explanations other than any actual meaningful decline in the beauty of filmmaking. It could be more a sampling problem than an aesthetic shift.

I'm talking about beauty, not prettiness.

Crap in a pretty cover is still crap.

Im not talking about the rate of masterpieces. Not all visually beautiful films are masterpieces.

They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Also, sometimes it takes decades before people come to call any movie a "masterpiece" - at least people who aren't movie critics desperate to be quoted in studio marketing materials

I sincerely doubt that todays directors don’t “try hard enough”, which is a statement that lacks actual data to support it anyways, so much that if one is nostalgic for older films, they will look to diminish anything that’s released today that doesn’t fit into their idea of what a film should look like.

Films are fine as they are today, even if they don’t hold up to, say the 70’s or 60’s films (sometimes), that doesn’t mean they are worthwhile in terms of beauty, which is always going to be subjective anyways when it comes to how one views besuty anyways.

People who are exposed to higher beauty less often are more prone to perceive mere prettiness as beauty.

You can see the visual beauty right away, though. It often takes decades for the film to be revalued, though, agreed, because critics are halfwits.

They simply don't. But if they do, that's even worse because it means they try hard but still fail, which means they are total failures, I guess?

Which is normal for any cinephile? An opinionated view of film is kinda of the point of cinephilia, amirite? I don't diminish anything, I'm only commenting on the perceived change in the beauty of the image between old and new cinema on average.

Ha! So you admit there's a drop in quality (sometimes).

You meant to say aren't I guess. Oh well, cinema should get better by the decade, not worse.

You kind of develop a taste of beauty and its many shades if you watch many films. You can quickly recognize that most contemporary films are simply not that beautiful when compared to countless examples of films of the yore.

I think you all guys agree with me in principle, but you're brainwashed by modern aesthetics to then add something like "but there are exceptions" or "but beauty is subjective". I fully acknowledge both, but my point is that films are less beautiful on average.

I mean, I don’t judge a film solely on how “beautiful” it looks anyways, as there are many other factors to include, even for a cinephile.

Less beautiful on average is subjective, again. Rather than assume we’re brainwashed, I’d say it more likely we see beauty different from you, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing either.

I don't people are brainwashed per se, but perhaps they may have not had a ton of exposure to classics or perhaps have a different perspective on what they find beautiful.

That said, I tend to agree that film is the overall superior medium when compared to digital, especially when overloaded with CGI. I also tend to favor older films when compared to contemporary fare. That's just my taste.

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I never said I judge films based on how beautiful they are. This thread is only about one factor of what makes a film good, which is visual beauty.

I daresay when we gauge beauty, we compare what we see to other things we've seen before. If one only saw pretty films but no beautiful films, they will think it's the best films can get visually. Watching many gorgeous films makes one's standards higher, thus making it easier to reject modern prettiness that can rarely pass off as beauty.

and there you are agreeing with me again

One thing I forgot to say earlier is that saying all (or even most) movies were better in the older days amounts to erasure of poverty row films. There were probably thousands of B-movie and cheap movies in the older days, not everything was a prestige film from MGM, WB or RKO.

It's very easy to forget about the movies coming out of the Poverty Row studios, many of them are lost forever.

This is an excellent point: crappy films are disproportionately forgotten, so the further into the past we look, the more we're inevitably filtering for quality, anyway.

I once was very lucky to attend a film festival that consisted of nothing but noirs from the Poverty Row studios - PRC, Monogram Pictures, Republic, etc. They had some kind of charm, but they looked absolutely terrible (not talking about some wear and tear, either, they were just horribly photographed). Almost anything coming out for theaters and streaming these days looks positively professional by comparison!

Yes, I love these movies. There are some stinkers from Poverty Row for sure but some are nice. Edgar G. Ulmer made some good ones, for example.

Plus Robot Monster is a masterpiece.

Here's a good example of a junk Edgar G Ulmer noir

Yeah, he made at least one stinker. I haven't seen the specific one you linked, though.

Anyway, rating a film, let alone its visuals, based on a poor-quality YouTube rip is like rating a person's attractiveness based on 5-second footage of them walking past a security camera.

Um, I'm a fan of it.