231 posts
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Post by harrietcraig on Sept 20, 2019 22:18:20 GMT
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587 posts
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Post by Polly1 on Sept 21, 2019 3:49:50 GMT
Great article. I used to struggle to explain my love of theatre to my mother, who would always tell me film was "more real". No, me neither...
Also "Watching a movie isn't watching acting - it's watching editing". This is exactly my problem with live transmissions, the audience can only watch what is on screen, unlike sitting in a theatre. Transmissions have their place, and I go often, but it just isn't theatre.
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4,038 posts
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Post by kathryn on Sept 21, 2019 8:10:45 GMT
The perception of film as ‘more real’ is fascinating. It’s an entirely learned response - there’s nothing actually realistic about how films are constructed via editing to tell stories.
And yet people are so conditioned to accept filmic conventions that they don’t even realise that they are doing it.
They’ll call musicals ‘unrealistic’ because people in real life don’t burst into song and dance routines - and that is of course entirely true. But they accept without question a film with a sweeping score, with montages, with jump cuts, with impossible point of view shots - even though in real life no music magically starts playing at big emotional moments and you can’t jump effortlessly from one point of view to another or between times and places.
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874 posts
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Post by daisy24601 on Sept 21, 2019 10:26:22 GMT
^Exaxtly this. Sometimes I try to imagine what this scene on TV or in a film would be like without the music in the background. As much as the actors give, a lot the emotion and drama would be lost. It's entirely unrealistic. It's a different art form and I enjoy both but there's something about live theatre that makes it more magical.
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5,586 posts
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Post by lynette on Sept 21, 2019 11:41:06 GMT
It is the ultimate ‘Let’s pretend’ which toddlers excel at and it enables empathy which we are poor at and it extends our time frame and space from thus giving us richer, longer lives so we can understand the lives we do have. Film does much of the same but lacks that element of breathing the same air as the pretenders, being within the ‘play’, taking the risk.
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2,389 posts
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Post by peggs on Sept 21, 2019 11:56:09 GMT
Good thread and article, I do find d it challenging to convey and articulate the wonder of great theatre in a way that doesn't seem do difficult for film. The editing of film and TV is of course so pertinent and you're right Polly I miss that choice in live screenings where I ask often want to be watching a reaction/someone listening rather than the focus on the person with the lines.
I agree with the analogy to church and sport, the shared never to be quite repeated experience and anticipation. And equally the capacity for boredom.
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4,038 posts
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Post by kathryn on Sept 22, 2019 9:02:35 GMT
^Exaxtly this. Sometimes I try to imagine what this scene on TV or in a film would be like without the music in the background. As much as the actors give, a lot the emotion and drama would be lost. It's entirely unrealistic. It's a different art form and I enjoy both but there's something about live theatre that makes it more magical. It’s one of the reasons I am such a geek for film behind the scenes stuff - you do often get to see what a scene was like before all the post-production work was done! There’s a bunch of Rocketman deleted scenes on YouTube that were obviously cut from the film at various stages of post-production. Some of them are fully edited sequences with sound and score, but some are just the rough-cut assemblies with no sound FX on yet. Including a scene where Elton is complaining about the sound of the wind outside - it’s really quite weird to watch as Taron Egerton is reacting to something that is not actually there, complaining about the noise on an entirely silent set, in a phone ‘conversation’ with no-one. And yet as a film viewer you just never think about the acting involved in a scene with an actor picking up a phone to talk to someone about a noise. We can hear the noise, and the other half of the conversation, so we assume those were present for the actor too. |
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