[matt-attack]

What you're saying is equivalent to:

"Impressionism is objectively worse than realism. Look at a Van Gogh painting, there's hardly any detail. It looks coarse, and grainy and the brush strokes are so wide I can hard tell what's what. Starry Starry Night would be objectively such a better painting if he had just reach for a finer brush and included more detail. Adding more detail would have made it far more realistic, and thus objectively better"

You see your premised is founded on the false pretense that realism is the goal. The Cinema frame rate of 24fps (while not chosen to achieve this, but by a happy accident) happens to be at that perfect balance between too choppy and realism. It's just off from reality enough to trigger that "impressionistic response" in our brain. The same thing that happens when we look at a Monet painting. Out brains find impressionism appealing because it's specifically not what our eyes see in the real world. It's an interpretation. It's someone else's view of the world. More detail is simply not the goal.

24fps Cinema is impressionism.

[tshaddox]

It’s more like complaining about higher resolution reproductions of a Van Gogh, because you grew up with dial-up internet and could only view highly compressed JPEG reproductions of Van Gogh so “that’s just how Van Gogh is supposed to look, these high fidelity digital reproductions look like desktop wallpaper.”

No one is saying that filmmakers couldn’t use lower frame rates as a deliberate stylistic device, similar to how 12 FPS can be used in films now (or black and white, or out of focus images, etc.), or even that all films previously shot in 24 FPS would be better if the frame rate was doubled with no other stylistic changes.

[davidmurdoch]

Playstation 2 and it's games were designed to look its best on Sony Trinitron TVs. When viewed on modern TVs, the games don't look like they used to, and the games can seem kinda dull in color but jagged in detail (anti-aliasing seems to have been in part the responsibility of the CRT itself). If the console was redesigned for today's TVs they'd look better.

I think the problem today is that the art of cinematography and technology evolved together up until ultra high-def digital came about, and now the art isn't keeping up with the advances in tech.

[Izkata]

> anti-aliasing seems to have been in part the responsibility of the CRT itself

Yep, and it goes much further back than the PS2. The original example I saw was of Zelda II on the NES, but here's a whole bunch of examples in a whole bunch of games/systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao-1uCCXBwc

[colordrops]

The problem with higher frame rates is the same as higher resolution. It emphasizes even more the poor quality of the content. The low fidelity masks some of this, leaving more to your imagination (which is how impressionism works). If the content were of higher quality then it wouldn't be as much of an issue.

[wongarsu]

On the other hand, low frame rates put a ceiling on some measures of quality, just as low resolution does. A fast-paced fight scene or a panning shot over a field of gras in the wind is very limited by what 24fps can show.

[Jare]

Gemini Man was a poor movie, but it was really interesting how it tried to use and explore the opportunities offered by high frame rate. I'm 100% in the club of people who can barely look at 24fps pans on the big screen, and wish 48fps and higher became the norm, were explored deeper so they could find solutions for the "soap opera" look - most likely figuring out a new look.

[adra]

Throw in as much garbage as you like, the human brain is only wired to appreciate a certain degree of information before it all gets washes out as noise. This is why imho the last 20 years in cinema has been a slow skid toward meteocracy.

The race to shove more crap at the screen to the appreciation of a younger and younger demographic to chase other tertiaries like toys, collectables, games etc.. means that the films are almost unwatchable by older people. I guess they're making their money so whatever, but it means that films feel more dead than ever before for myself. Admittedly, this may be more biased by aging out of existing target demos anyways, so shrugs.

[whynotminot]

We need to go back to 480i to increase immersion.

[spookthesunset]

What I find funny is looking at older TV shows that were clearly meant to be shown on old analog 4:3 CRT's but shot in film anyway. Now these shows show up in syndication and all that film got scanned as 16:8 HD. Some examples include Seinfeld, Friends, even Wizard of Oz. Many times it feels like you are watching a play instead of an immersive show. All the props look like props instead of something "real"

[gmueckl]

I had similar moments when watching the remastered Star Trek TNG. Some of the sets - the bridge set for one - had been built so that they would just barely hold up when viewed on analog video / SD TV. With the film scans, all the messy shortcuts and crimes are easily visible. The set builders must have had some deep knowledge of what shows up on camera and what doesn't to cut the corners they did.

[colordrops]

The lofi tv scene is waiting to explode.

[mort96]

I have no problems with non-realistic art forms. I think 12 FPS hand animation can look amazing, and the 12 FPS is part of the artistic expression. You're right, realism is absolutely not always the goal, and being unrealistic is sometimes the point.

But for the kind of movie that's supposed to take place in a world very much like ours? The kind where it's just a camera filming actors in a street or whatever, and there's no intentional impressionistic art style? An "impressionist" frame rate is totally inappropriate in such a context.

EDIT: I'd actually be very interested to know why people are downvoting this comment. I'm accepting that there can be artistic merit to low frame rates, but I'm rejecting the idea that impressionism should be forced on art which isn't trying to be impressionist. What's objectionable? (I see the comment is in the positive now, it was at -1 when I wrote the first edit)

[ClumsyPilot]

Its like if people loved combustion cars because you get high on petroleum fumes, and rejecting electric cars because they don't stink the same way and dont make as much noise.

Its a cult.

[b112]

An "impressionist" frame rate is totally inappropriate in such a context.

Start with the shakey cam effect, often added post production, which does what no human head/eyes do during fast movement.

(And often used to cover up poor quality fight scenes)

Second using an incapable camera person, the camera jumping around like my grandma doing video on her phone. Steady cams, and gear, and booms, are a century old!

While I am open to looking at all modern issues, I'd prefer getting rid of purposeful garbage first.

[matt-attack]

> The kind where it's just a camera filming actors in a street or whatever,

Hopefully this image search [1] answers your question. The photographs in each of these was "simply taking a photo of a street, a common real-life thing". Yet, when you look at them, almost every single one of them is highly stylized. Whether it's simply by being B&W (yes that's not reality), having pronounced bokeh, strong silhouetting, or even vignetting, etc. They're all absolutely not what I'd call realism.

Realism is just boring. And artists don't find much appeal in producing it.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=street+photography&t=osx&iar=image...

[throwbadubadu]

That's also an opinion and you are stretching the art comparison quite much, 24fps is a standard and limitation and photo/film most often is to capture some reality and not so much an interpretation of someone else's view in Monet sense? Most often the cinematic art part comes in on other dimensions, even if for some few it is those 24fps and other limitations.

[Godel_unicode]

It’s hard to argue that it’s an intentional artistic choice if the overwhelming majority of compositions use it. It would be like saying a Monet being viewed through oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere is an artistic choice.

[jackothy]

And even more so when it was 100% driven by technological limitations. The original Hollywood filmmakers of the early 1900s didn't choose not to film at 1000 FPS. There was simply no feasible way at the time to get above 20-30 FPS. The current standard was never chosen.

[mattigames]

Many paintings were too "never chosen" and were made in that medium because photography didn't exist back then, Henry VIII probably would have hired a professional photographer instead of a professional painter if it had been possible, despite all that painters still exist alongside photographers in modern times.

[xeromal]

Not necessarily because art does happen in eras. So maybe everyone were impressionists for a batch of years it was the de jure way to paint but in a 100 years it moved on but we still appreciate them. Sure, 48FPS may be the way of the future but that doesn't mean the flavor of 24 FPS won't be appreciated in the future.

[Godel_unicode]

No it doesn’t. Lots of different artistic schools have existed at once all through history. Just because some style was invented doesn’t mean that everyone dropped what they were doing and became surrealists.

There are people painting what would be considered impressionist painting now (literally now, I have a friend who frequently paints on sundays and texted to ask before writing this).

[matt-attack]

My understanding is that once photography was invented, painters somewhat abandoned realism in favor of impressionism and other more experimental forms. Since painting was no longer needed to fulfill the boring need for reproducing reality. Not to say, that realism doesn't continue to this day, but honestly, most painters don't aspire to it even now.

[matt-attack]

I never said intentional. Up until the last decade, filmmakers had little choice but to distribute films in 24fps. I'm ignoring the few titles where they did indeed experiment with higher ones, like Oklahoma at 30fps and Brainstorm.

[matt-attack]

Yes, an I did indeed state that it was a "happy accident". 24 was chosen for pragmatic reasons but happened to, simultaneously, result in an amazing impressionistic effect. Both are possible.

[ClumsyPilot]

> What you're saying is equivalent to: "Impressionism is objectively worse than realism

Type 'art' into google, how many pictures are impressionism, 1 in 10?

Pick a movie at random, what are the chances it's made in 24 fps? 99.9%?

Why do you thin TVs have motion smoothing? Because, we, normal people, are sick of you impressionist-obsessed people controlling everything.

[zuminator]

TV as a medium is different from the big screen. People watch sporting, talk shows and live events on TV, rarely at the movies. And the convention is for those types of things to be viewed at higher frame rates. Films can be viewed at higher frame rates but then they tend to have a TV-ified look. Which is ok, if you personally dislike the film look and prefer movies to look like daytime television. But for many people, film shot in high frame-rate, particularly in slower, less action-oriented scenes, looks too much like a broadcast experience and too little like a cinematic experience.

On a recent episode of The Filmcast, David Chen speculates that there's something of a generational divide to the preference [0]. He thinks that younger people, brought up on big screen TVs, 120 fps oled smartphones, and 240 fps gaming action, may just come to prefer high frame rate for everything, whereas older folk might be more nostalgically drawn to the traditional slow frame rate for movies.

[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-700-avatar-the-way-...

[jjeaff]

>He thinks that younger people, brought up on big screen TVs, 120 fps oled smartphones, and 240 fps gaming action

This might be true farther in the future. But the vast majority of kids now were certainly not brought up on 240fps games and 120hz smartphones.

The iPhone 14 is still 60hz and the Galaxy s21 is the first Samsung phone to have 120hz and it was released in 2021.

And 240fps gaming monitors are a thing, but not really mainstream yet.

[wyre]

The only pictures of realism google image search for “art” in the top ten is the Mona Lisa, The Birth of Venus by Botticelli, and the Consequenses of War by Rubens slightly out of the 15.

Compared to two Van Gogh paintings, a Hugo Simberg painting, an anime mural, a digitally rendered skeleton covered in flowers, and abstract stock photos of an colorful eye, and two impressionist paintings.

So to answer your question it’s 3/10 are impressionist. 4 if you have a liberal definition of Impressionism and include the skeleton.

[ip26]

So all cinema and all producers are targeting precisely the same level of impressionism? None desire any more or less realism?

[matt-attack]

Well a few experimented with slightly more realism. Todd AO was a film format that ran at 30fps. 20th Century Fox shot Oklahoma in that format. I've seen it projected at 30fps and it certainly has one foot in the "soap opera effect" door.

The movie Brainstorm also experimented with using the HFR as part of the story telling. But being in the film days, it was difficult to project/distribute.

Avatar 2 is the first modern equivalent to Brainstorm, where the filmmaker opted to "turn a knob" to digitally change the frame rate in a variable fashion throughout the film, depending on what the content needed. (Not the final content appeared to be 48fps, but the apparent frame-rate within that container varies from 24 smoothly to 48fps.

[threadweaver34]

I agree with your point on realism vs impressionism, but I still buy the explanation what we prefer 24 fps movies because we're conditioned to, not because of a preference for impressionism.

I also like my wine expensive and with nice labels.

[matt-attack]

I think I reject the "conditioned" argument. If I saw this [1] painting and compared it to a hyper-realistic painting (or photograph for that matter) I suspect the photograph would be boring in comparison. Certainly not world famous.

No one would say, "well you're just conditioned to like the impressionistic form better". I think it's just objectively more interesting. An iPhone snapshot of the same scene is just boring. If anything, my point is proven by what people attempt in their photographs. They add vignetting, color treatment, bokey, etc. All these things are forms of impressionism. No one wants a perfectly realistic photo.

[1] http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YiHuMtP-658/Usi_fBZsLSI/AAAAAAAADA...

[Nursie]

Cool, so people that want that effect on their movies can use it, it hardly sounds like something everyone would want every time though.

Or is impressionism the only valid art form?

Also -

> happens to be at that perfect balance between ...

Yeah na, it's just what you're used to.

[baryphonic]

> Cool, so people that want that effect on their movies can use it, it hardly sounds like something everyone would want every time though.

That's not what GP said. GP was arguing that 24fps is a genuine artistic choice, and that an argument that 48fps is intrinsically superior is absurd. GP was arguing that frame rate is a choice artists can use to tell their stories, that 24fps is Impressionism and 48fps is realism.

Also, cross examining (e.g. "so, you're saying...") is against HN policies. Misrepresenting what someone said is also not great.

[ClumsyPilot]

> GP was arguing that frame rate is a choice artists can use to tell their stories, that 24fps is Impressionism and 48fps is realism

Okay, where is 77 FPS movie for surrealism, 12 FPS movie for abstractionism, 174 FPS for cubism?

The whole argument is fictitious

[matt-attack]

Well that's just not how the physics works. It's a single dimension that slides from hyper-impressionism (at low low Frame rates) to hyper-realism at high ones. And BTW it's been shown to top out around 75-80fps. Any higher and there's no additional perception of realism. Realism is just the single axis.

[Nursie]

> GP was arguing that 24fps is a genuine artistic choice

Yes, and I'm saying that's spurious argument because if it were an artistic choice we'd have a lot more variation of said choice.

> cross examining (e.g. "so, you're saying...")

Where did I do that? I was making the point that impressionism is not the only art form. I know the GP wasn't arguing it should be, but again, that's where their analogy breaks down.

[matt-attack]

See my other sibling reply regarding the "conditioning" argument.

[Nursie]

I'm afraid I don't really buy that. I know, having lived through the transition away from PAL/NTSC and (worse) VHS that people will make arguments as to how the old tech softened things, made them look nicer, softer etc. How such and such an existing standard is perfect, and does this, this and this to the brain. How HD is unnecessary and just shows off actor's bad skin and who wants that?

Habituation is powerful, and even if this effect you're talking about does exist, well firstly it's not going to be appropriate for every subject matter. Secondly the technological limitations which led the industry to arrive at that standardised framerate, the chance of that landing on some sort of optimum spot... it's just not believable.