Tim Sewell

4 hours ago, tupp said:

Here is another from 1964:

 

Well yeah, that really shows that I'm wrong when I say that films reflect the social mores of the societies that make them. Doesn't trade on sexist or heteronormative tropes in the slightest!

Unfortunately it's a feature of this world that when one wants other people's money to do something, one has to do it in a way they want. Submit your script, once you have a producer. It may well be the case that if there are no aspects to it that are exclusionary and they like it they'll be interested. Diversity doesn't have to be explicit as in - this character is a black lesbian - but the corollary is true - we can't have 'this character is white'.

At the end of the day, however, it may be better to try to find purely commercial funding for movies that don't fully satisfy the wishes and/or mission statements of publicly-funded bodies (which generally exist to fund projects that can't attract commercial funding).

Has your script actually been rejected by the funding body, @Stab?

1 hour ago, IronFilm said:

(to give but one example of many)

Nice bit of research, but not really relevant to the point my use of that example was intended to illustrate.

11 minutes ago, Stab said:

But then there is a whole world of films which aren't, and that is perfectly fine as well. We need both kind of films. There is nothing political about Shutter Island, but it is still a a great film with a great story.

I'm sorry, but that's simply not the case. There may not be any overt political content or intent, but any cultural product will reflect the politics and generally-accepted ethics of the society that produces it. If a society routinely ignores the experiences and existence, even, of - say - black women, then black women won't be cast because it will never occur to the creators that an individual role could just as easily be played by someone whose ethnicity is other than white. If, when I think of a doctor, I think of a late middle-aged white man - which would reflect my formative experiences of interactions with doctors - then unless I confront that intellectually I wouldn't even notice that I might be being exclusionary in my thinking.

Up until this year, the USA had never had a female Vice President, much less one of colour. If I had been in the happy position of casting a movie about the Presidency back in 1989, would I have even considered that possibility? If I had done and I had cast the role accordingly, would I have been subject to the same criticisms of 'wokeness' that are aimed at people who advocate for a black James Bond, or female Ghostbusters?

Likewise, the vast majority of mainstream films take it as read that the only model of political economy that can be considered normal is that of globalised hyper-capitalism. Any movie that takes that as its basis (which isn't even a decision that gets made) is inherently political, whether we like it or not, as it helps to perpetuate and normalise a system that many could argue, with some validity, is detrimental to both the planet's condition and the pursuit of human happiness. Likewise the countless movies set in suburban nuclear families whose members fulfil the genderised and economic roles expected of them without comment. I'm not saying that there should be comment, but one has to recognise that those movies, as a part of a popular culture, both maintain a status quo that many find stifling while at the same time excluding or invalidating the many alternative family models that we coexist with, or experience, out in the real world.

Shutter Island looks at, among other things, concepts of insanity, the treatment of the mentally ill, notions of personal autonomy and responsibility, corruption and medical ethics. It looks at those things in a period setting, but through the prism of more modern attitudes in those areas. It may not be a film about politics, but politics, past and present, inform its milieu in every possible way.

9 hours ago, Stab said:

Film has become political. And it sucks. 

Film has always been political because film has always, unavoidably, reflected the politics, power structures, culture and mores of the societies in which it has been made.

What a lot of people are finding difficult right now is that sections of western societies who had previously been ignored or stereotyped in cinema now demand the levels of representation, opportunity and respect that white heterosexuals have received since the medium was invented.

5 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Remember the lie of "flatten the curve" we were sold back in 2020?

How was it a lie? That was certainly what happened here in the UK. Without lockdown measures the curve would have been steeper and the peak a hell of a lot higher (a nice way of saying a lot more people would have suffocated to death).

10 hours ago, newfoundmass said:

In short, aside from using false equivalency, you really have no clue what you're talking about and simply read stuff from other people that also don't know what they're talking about and then repeat it. 

Kudos to you for taking the time to respond to someone who is providing, as a citation, a post from someone called wank_666 - I really couldn't summon the energy.

32 minutes ago, Eric Calabros said:

Its like saying poor people in developed countries shouldn't call themselves poor, because some kids somewhere in India are dying because there is no enough food.

No. It's like saying free people in a country built on genocide and slavery, who daily benefit from that history, shouldn't call themselves enslaved when they're asked to temporarily change their lifestyles in order to save the lives of their neighbours.

34 minutes ago, Eric Calabros said:

Slavery is about a situation where a person or a group of people, commonly known as master, decides how you should live. Some people have legitimately concluded that they're in that situation right now. The mathematical measurements of misery is not the subject.

No. Slavery is a situation where a person or a group of people are forced to labour for no recompense. Some people have concluded that they're in that situation right now because they're too spoilt and entitled to countenance a temporary disruption to their lives in order to save the lives of their neighbours.

When I was growing up, in the 1970s, on a wet Sunday or during a winter half-term, if you wanted to watch something on TV there was a very limited choice (in the UK, we only had 3 channels) so at some point one always found oneself watching old black and white movies, old technicolour movies... just old movies. I swear I learnt more about history, humans, social interaction and - importantly in the context of this discussion - storytelling - from those movies.

Now and for a good number of years up to now, kids in that same state of wet-weekend ennui can watch terabytes of 'content' tailored precisely to their sensibilities. They have no need to sit on the sofa and gradually get drawn in to a piece of narrative storytelling made decades before their births. One of the results of this that I've noticed in my own children is that movies I consider to be great pieces of art and entertainment, they find unbearably slow-paced. Modern mass-market films - built on beats - have a 'wow' moment roughly every minute or so. It's a relentless succession of - as @Ed David mentions above - dopamine hits. So obviously the industry, competing against social media, 30 second 'fail' videos and needing to attract and retain the attention of an audience that will switch off anything that features slow burns and subtle inferences, has responded by catering to that need for mindless, incessant thrills (Not saying Hollywodd hasn't always done that, to an extent, but its output now is probably less varied and nuanced than ever before).

Maybe people get a bit more discerning and open to these things as they get older. I hope so. I sometimes feel like large swathes of us have been the subjects of a giant unintentional experiment, the results of which help no-one and are, one-by-one, destroying so many parts of our shared culture that - had we been asked - we would have preferred to keep intact.

14 hours ago, TheDudeAbides said:

I thought we were talking about closing down businesses and lock downs and mandating stay at home policies - which I do consider a form of slavery.

Medically justified, temporary, standard public health measures aimed at containing a deadly pandemic are not slavery - the view of the world betrayed by such a characterisation is either simplistic or solipsistic.

I'm very sorry for your father's suffering - but really, what is the alternative? Do hospitals allow normal visiting by relatives and friends who may unknowingly be spreading a virus that could kill not only the patient concerned but also many others in the hospital who are highly vulnerable? Or do they devote hours of scarce nursing time helping said visitors to don PPE to a clinical standard?

All of the measures enacted around the world have their basis in the fact that we are faced with a virus that many can spread without even realising they're infected, but which for many others is a death sentence. In other words - they call upon those who in the main can withstand the infection to temporarily undergo some personal detriment - be it economic, social, emotional or to their own mental health in order to protect their fellow citizens who might not be so lucky.

You say it's your right to take the personal risk of getting sick or dying. But what of the health worker treating you who you infect and goes on to die, or to have their life blighted by long Covid? What of the rights of the key worker infected because they have no choice but to continue to work and mix who is denied a hospital bed because you - who was exercising his rights - have taken it up due to entirely avoidable infection? Why do your 'rights' (really just a conviction that you shouldn't be inconvenienced or disappointed along with everybody else) trump theirs?

I wonder it what possible universe being asked to reduce social contact and to take simple precautions like wearing a mask in enclosed spaces, during a pandemic that has so far killed half a million Americans (and many more the world over) can be characterised as 'slavery'. I mean, it's not like there's any shortage of examples of *actual* slavery available to see in the historical record of the good ol' USA.

I bought a s/h Nikon Coolscan for around £350 from the bay, came with the manual and auto film holders (unfortunately the auto one doesn't work with my favoured scanning software, Silverfast - it needs a firmware update for which I'd need a 32bit WinXP or something awful). I have to say that the quality of the scans is excellent and definitely up to my needs, which top out at 16x20 prints.

3 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Guesses:
1) crippled stills mode
2) no IBIS

Given the FX denomination - Sony's cinema line - I'd be surprised if it has a stills mode at all, likewise IBIS. I think people looking for something comparable to, or an alternative to the A7Siii are probably barking up the wrong tree here. I'd look upon this (subject to further info) as Sony's riposte to Canon's C70. I'm not in the market for a new camera (and if I was I'd prefer the form factor of the FX6) but this - especially at the rumoured price -  looks like it could be an extremely tasty option!

12 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

If these variables are held constant then the results should look the same for a given roll of film.

Processing too. Even a half degree temperature difference or a 30 second timing difference will result in colour and exposure shifts.

Fair enough - I'm no expert. He framed it as a defect and that's what I was reporting back to the board.

2 minutes ago, Tito Ferradans said:

No, he didn't. Would you care to explain the "bug" in your own words?

As far as I recall he found that, in the lens he was testing, the amount of anamorphic compression varied according to the focus distance.

Interesting discussion along very similar lines going on now at Lift Gamma Gain: https://liftgammagain.com/forum/index.php?threads/what-is-the-best-example-of-film-emulation.15452/

The benefits of digital are, of course, undeniable - in fact this forum wouldn't exist were it not for the advent of large-sensor video and many of its enthusiast members, myself included, would never have been able to even get into a position where these discussions are possible without it.

We have 2 competing sets of desires when it comes to large sensor video. On the one hand we want more resolution, greater bit depth and higher frame rates (all of which improve the ROI for professional users); while on the other, we want sensors that will satisfy our aesthetic desires which for most of us align much more with the organic nature of celluloid than they do with pristine Rec709 video. Perhaps those two desire sets will never be compatible, but unfortunately there will never be sufficient sales to enthusiast users to justify pro-sumer/consumer level equipment that abandons the megapixel/frame rate race in favour of a lower resolution with film-like DR etc.

I was having this discussion (sort of) with a couple of occasional photo shooters just on Friday. they were saying that there was now no discernible difference between film and digital. I disagreed. I can certainly easily differentiate the stills I shoot on film, to those I've shot on digital - even though I generally process the latter to look as much like the former as I can. The organic, random, chemical nature of silver halide photography gives a highlight roll-off - and just as important, a roll-off to underexposure - plus a transition from in to out-of focus that simply can't be achieved in a grid matrix of photosensitive receptors. That look is at once closer to and further away from what we see with our own eyes and that is where its magic lies.

25 minutes ago, MrSMW said:

French TV is utter shit

Apart from Engrenages.

14 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

None of this ever happened of course which is why the chart looks like it does above, rather than being the fault of consumers switching to smartphones. It is more that the Japanese camera corporations did nothing to mitigate it.

Well of course - but history is littered with dead industries whose players failed to foresee the full effects of technological change. But in terms of actual hardware, there was and is literally nothing that could save mass-market camera sales. You have to remember that the vast majority of the millions of point'n'shoots that used to be sold every year weren't in daily use - they sat in drawers, brought out for the annual holiday, birthdays and Christmas. People who worked in mass-market photo labs used to laugh about rolls of 24 frames that were bookended with snaps from 2 consecutive festive seasons. So when you arrive, accidentally (don't forget, cameras in phones started out as a minor value-add) at a scenario where everybody has a far higher (for them) quality camera in their pockets all the time that they don't even have to think about putting in there - well; tell me what camera makers could have done to their products to make them attractive enough for Joe Schmoe to put his hand in his pocket for a separate device that he has to remember to get out of the drawer.

It's by no means a happy situation, but it is what it is and it's where we are. With the benefit of hindsight we can debate whether or not it was inevitable. We can posit ways in which CaNikon etc could have safeguarded their businesses - but the ways in which they could have done that, including the strategies Andrew suggests, might have saved their businesses, but wouldn't have done anything to preserve any kind of market for consumer cameras sufficient to continue supporting higher end gear for enthusiasts.

Pity the enthusiast! 'pro-sumer' models have always been supported by healthy sales of point'n'shoots. Take those away and, as @Marcio Kabke Pinheiro says, we'll be left with pro cameras at pro prices and Leica-level enthusiast models. people will be able to snap 500MP pictures of us weeping, on their wristwatch cams.

Well Potato jet found a bit of a bug with the Siruis:

3 hours ago, Mark Romero 2 said:

Yeah, Sony GM glass (or the Zeiss 55mm f/1.8, or Sigma Art Glass) on an a7R II would be pretty spectacular. 

I'm thinking that once the dust settles on my PayPal account I might get one native (or Sigma) prime. I'm leaning towards a 35mm, that being just about my favourite focal length on FF (for stills, that is).