Love the idea of this being connected to the rise of surveillance, screens, and everything more generally being recorded; made me wonder if this current surge in popularity is also tied to advances in digital film and what an audience expects.
Fifty years ago, a technique like this would have stood out very blatantly because audiences were more familiar with film as a physical medium, and would recognise the uncanny nature of both objects being in focus. Now, so much of what we see is digitally rendered (or at the very least tweaked), so we've lost some of our instinctive recognition of how physical cameras behave.
The unsettled feeling of a split diopter shot in the contemporary film landscape becomes more subconsciously creepy, more of an uncanny valley wrong-ness that nudges us to grapple with what is and isn't real on the screen -- which would still be very aligned with the theme you point to, of being uncertain of each other's intentions. This feels like a response to surveillance and screens, definitely, but also possibly a response to the rise of AI-generated slop, which is both unreal AND lacking in human intention.
Dashing this off ... but there's a very memorable-to-me part of the Miami Vice director's commentary where Michael Mann mentions that the shot of basically everyone together in this big, long room wouldn't have been possible 5 years age. Everyone is in very different points in the plane but still in focus. I'm interested and frightened, I guess, to see how AI lets people do things they previously couldn't or wouldn't have (garish CG reanimation of actors images, for example) and what that will mean for how film looks but also shapes storytelling ....
I almost suspect that small flaws, things that make films seem human-made, will become signature. Things like lens flare, bits of dust on the film reel, etc. Signs that the thing was created by human hands.
I keep thinking about that Brian Eno quote where he talks about how the things that we find weird or uncomfortable in a new medium eventually become its signature - how we used to try to erase those flaws and now we try to recreate them.
Love the idea of this being connected to the rise of surveillance, screens, and everything more generally being recorded; made me wonder if this current surge in popularity is also tied to advances in digital film and what an audience expects.
Fifty years ago, a technique like this would have stood out very blatantly because audiences were more familiar with film as a physical medium, and would recognise the uncanny nature of both objects being in focus. Now, so much of what we see is digitally rendered (or at the very least tweaked), so we've lost some of our instinctive recognition of how physical cameras behave.
The unsettled feeling of a split diopter shot in the contemporary film landscape becomes more subconsciously creepy, more of an uncanny valley wrong-ness that nudges us to grapple with what is and isn't real on the screen -- which would still be very aligned with the theme you point to, of being uncertain of each other's intentions. This feels like a response to surveillance and screens, definitely, but also possibly a response to the rise of AI-generated slop, which is both unreal AND lacking in human intention.
Dashing this off ... but there's a very memorable-to-me part of the Miami Vice director's commentary where Michael Mann mentions that the shot of basically everyone together in this big, long room wouldn't have been possible 5 years age. Everyone is in very different points in the plane but still in focus. I'm interested and frightened, I guess, to see how AI lets people do things they previously couldn't or wouldn't have (garish CG reanimation of actors images, for example) and what that will mean for how film looks but also shapes storytelling ....
Yes, this is exactly what I’m thinking about!
I almost suspect that small flaws, things that make films seem human-made, will become signature. Things like lens flare, bits of dust on the film reel, etc. Signs that the thing was created by human hands.
I keep thinking about that Brian Eno quote where he talks about how the things that we find weird or uncomfortable in a new medium eventually become its signature - how we used to try to erase those flaws and now we try to recreate them.