Every Frame a Painting
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2017–2025
8:25 · 11M views · Mar 20, 2015
An Every Frame a Painting video essay on how Akira Kurosawa used movement, weather and composition to tell stories. It draws on clips and interviews with other filmmakers.
HN commenters recommend it as a deeply researched example of film analysis and one of the most educational videos on YouTube.
8 comments from Hacker News
What I love about Every Frame a Painting is the depth of its research. It's quite clear that the creators had an extensive knowledge of film. The videos always include wonderfully selected interviews with the filmmakers that emphasize the point far more than just a person talking. The Deakins interview in Shot | Reverse Shot taken from Cinematographer Style is a nice example^[1]. Or Sidney Lumet's interview in the Kurosawa video^[2]. Taking from film criticism solidifies the video's arguments, creates an amazing rhythm to the videos (Tony and Taylor are clearly great editors) and also prevents the "annoying person endlessly lecturing to me about film" feeling that I get with some other channels. I've thought about doing videos of my own on various topics (the usage of eyes and glances in Il Posto, Kieslowski's poetry, the reflexivity of In the Mood for Love, etc.) but the YouTube film criticism industry is pretty saturated. Perhaps a different format? [1]: [LINK] [2]: this video
If you havne't already done so, check out the wonderful commentary by 'Every Frame a Painting': this video (Composing Movement) [LINK] (The Geometry of a Scene) I don't normally recommend YouTube channels for film commentary, but this channel is very good indeed.
I think we're sort of aggressively agreeing with each other. It's not the CGI (or lack thereof) that makes the modern superhero films bad (except as a sort of demoscene-with-infinite-budget visual spectacle where they're great). It's the writing. To a lesser extent the cinematography is poor, which makes it hard to really feel what's going on. There's lots of unnecessary camera movement, frenetic jump cuts during fights, and all the colors are dull and muted. Every Frame a Painting has a good video on Kurosawa's use of movement in his films, and actually uses The Avengers as a contrasting example and how the cinematography & direction makes the scene in question feel meaningless.[1] So I agree that it's not the CGI that's the problem. It's the writing, the direction, the cinematography, the editing, the music[2] (though they improved since the linked video came out, directly in response to it), etc. The films are bad in many ways, but the CGI isn't really one of them. [1] this video [2] [LINK]
Part of this, I think, is also the shift to dialogue-based scripts. It reminds me of this excellent Every Frame a Painting video that compares Kurosawa’s effective use of movement with the barely-moving, dialogue-driven Avengers films. A huge percentage of films/shows today are what Hitchcock called, “photographs of people talking” and aren’t actually cinematic. If they were more cinematic, hearing every line of dialogue wouldn’t be as important to understanding the story. Start at about 4:25: this video
Selected Twitter responses: - Why Planes Don't Fly Faster, [LINK] - Akira Kurosawa - Composing Movement, this video - Richard Hamming: "Learning to Learn", [LINK] - Rise and fall of Third Reich, [LINK] - The men who built America, [LINK] -History of the World, [LINK]