What is it that we love when we love a film? What is my taste and why is it not your taste? Is there really something that makes a movie good? I went a long time without asking these questions. I think most of do and probably a large share of us never really ask these questions of ourselves. We watch, walk away, ponder, but are content to just feel it in the moment. But yet, if art film is a film which we feel compelled to talk about after we see it, what is it that we want to talk about? What makes it work, or not? THIS IS PART OF AN ONGOING SERIES IN AN ATTEMPT TO ANSWER THOSE QUESTIONS (AT LEAST FOR ME PERSONALLY):

TRUTHFULNESS:
Truth isn’t just about what is presented, it is also about what a filmmaker chooses to not present. To understand a world, you need a whole truth. To leave something out distorts, and a filmmaker has to take responsibility for that omission. When a film makes it look like “evil” is simply an individual choice, and not a symptom of something greater, that distortion grows in prominence with an audience. On a strictly formal level, that distortion distances an audience from the content because we recognize that what looks like a complete world is in fact something else.

A director may make the choice to foreground the performance of his or her actor, and not try to demonstrate naturalism. One could argue that perhaps this is the greater truth as it acknowledges that all we can ever film is someone being filmed, and generally aware of being filmed, but regardless it demonstrates the elusive quality of truth on film.

Yet truth in film is a bit like the court’s definition of pornography: we know it when we see it. Or perhaps we know that it isn’t when we see something other than truth on film. An overdressed set is something we recognize as not being truthful, just like an actor who seeks to convey their emotions in too overt a manner, or when an edit is used to hide time passage or display it with too heavy a hand.

— Ted Hope