[ecshafer]

> In this way, it feels a lot like modern movies: in a lot of cases, cinematography seems to be some sort of objective science which has mostly just improved. And nowadays even a fairly bad movie will have great cinematography. It's just that the writing / plot / acting / etc. are quite poor.

I vehemently disagree with this. Cinematography has gotten substantially worse in the last 15 years or so. Your run of the mill direct to vhs type movie in the 90s had better cinematography than your massive block buster of today. Hollywood totally forgot how to do everything. Go compare a garbage movie like "The Parent Trap" with Marvel/Star Wars anything, and see how bad its gotten.

[everdrive]

There's a lot of room for nuance here and I'll bet we disagree less than it sounds. I would agree with you that blockbuster movies do cinematography badly. But take your random crappy low-budget horror movie, and compare the cinematography to an equivalent film from the 1970s. The difference is stark. Techniques such as Hitchcock's dolly zoom, or the "power" shots from Citizen Kane are well known and widely used. They're easy to reproduce, but take brilliance to initially envision. Combine this with some of the modern technology; drones, camera stabilizers, etc. and things get taken further Try looking at a car chase from your average 70s film: you'll get a very shaky shot because it's filmed from inside the car, and in most cases the footage will be sped up because it wasn't save enough to film the real event. You end up with something which is totally implausible. The same for flyover shots -- previously these would be done in a helicopter and you'd get an incredibly shaky distant shot, but now anyone with any budget can put an amazing drone shot in a film for no money whatsoever.

[ses1984]

And yet with all these techniques easily available to them, modern filmmakers still churn out a lot of trash.

It’s a matter of taste and style, not technique or quality of gear.

But I don’t agree that old==good and new==bad. There was plenty of trash back in the day, and plenty of great stuff now.

Breaking bad had fantastic cinematography and it didn’t really use advanced techniques like dolly zoom, crane, drone, etc. It had buckets of style though. Compare it to one of its contemporaries, Dexter, which had completely unremarkable, boring, functional cinematography.

The single most important advancement for modern cinematography is to be able to instantly see what your shot is going to look like without having to develop film. This allowed filmmakers to shoot at night, use natural or diegetic lighting, etc. it used to be risky and require a lot of testing to do anything other than bathe your scene in bright light and then use even brighter stage lights for highlights, to give cameras enough light, and to ensure that performances and stunts are visible in the final product. This is way way more impactful than drones and dollies.

[everdrive]

I'd agree with all your statements. I don't think your statements disagree with the observation that on average cinematography has gotten better over time. I might have painted too broad of a brush, and I think you raise really good points.