I think that I think therefore I am, or do I and am I? Also: a montage.

June 12, 2022 12:16 PM

Here's an interesting 25-minute video essay from Mike Rugnetta on dirt on camera lenses, questioning the principle of suspension of disbelief, Descartes vs. Spinoza on evaluating truth, and the nature of our internal engagement with fiction.
posted by cortex (5 comments total)

Dude totally skips over the "there's a whole shorthand of things that is done in every media that doesn't make perfect sense if you jump right to the final point." Dirt on camera lens is 100% that (as is shaky cam, as is lens flare, etc etc). Yes there it is where that came from. Yes it had a stylistic choice. But it also is a way of evoking a mood that can't be easily shown in a medium of only pictures and sound.
posted by aspo at 12:44 PM on June 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

That is, we know that movies are made with cameras. We know about CGI. We accept that now, so playing with that format is part of a movie. When we weren't as familiar with the concept these shortcuts wouldn't make as much sense, they would just look like mistakes, like a boom mike in a short or a truck in the background of a fantasy movie. In fact some of them came out of those "mistakes" that couldn't always be avoided. Dusty dirty filming location? Dust got on the lens sometimes. See that enough times and when you intentionally do it people understand you are saying "it's fucking dusty out there." It becomes a style choice (which some people will abuse.) There's tons of style choices in film that are not 1:1 with reality. It's a medium with a stylistic language that has evolved over 100+ years.
posted by aspo at 12:49 PM on June 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Sounds like something adjacent to the impact of shallow depth of field / focus on our perception.

It wasn't common for paintings prior to the proliferation of cameras to have depth of field differentiation between in-focus / out-of-focus objects, because they painted the image exactly as if a person was THERE in the scene - if you looked at a near part of the painting, it would be sharp because your eyes in real life would focus there, and if you looked at a distant part of the painting, it would also be sharp because your eyes in real life would focus there instead.

Without context, you'd think that shallow depth of field shots in movies and photos would be unnatural and unrealistic and pull us out of the experience, however we're so used to this limitation of the medium (and it's been cleverly utilized by artists as a way of pulling and directing your visual attention and also utilized for aesthetic reasons) that photos and movies WITHOUT shallow depth of field feel flat and awful. Our entire view of reality now exists through the lens of a shallow DOF camera....
posted by xdvesper at 7:13 PM on June 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

See also: Musca depicta, the depiction of flies as conspicuous elements of paintings.
posted by oulipian at 9:37 AM on June 13, 2022

It's odd, I'm totally on with, too the point that I hardly notice, this is movies. But it irritates me to no end in video games. Playing the mass effect series, the lens flair showing up as if there was a multi lens camera filming the action was jarring. In horizon zero dawn, the way that water drips down the screen after Aloy swims also pulled me out of the game. (I pick these two examples because they are games that are excellent and really have few flaws outside of things like this)

In the examples presented, some of the time I didn't even see the stuff on the lens. I think my brain processes things differently when watching them vs being actively engaged with controls. Part of that might be because games have an established trope of interference with the visual portraying something the player needs to acknowledge and act on (the example of inked from the video). In a way, I think a deeper level of initial acceptance needs to be entered into with interactive media, which, combined with the active response to these effects, leads to them conversely being more immersion breaking.
posted by Hactar at 10:00 AM on June 13, 2022