Everyone in the seventies looked ugly except me

I talked to Ben yesterday RE: the Network post. I think that he felt it was unfair to judge films of one era using the standards of another. That's certainly understandable and I hope studios don't de-grain films to make them palatable to Blu-Ray tastes, the present day the equivalent of colorizing or pan and scan. At the same time, there's no question that developments in technology along with the logic of marketing change the way we see the past. So my post on grain was a way of noting that the 'look' of films I grew up watching on the big screen, like Network, no longer seems transparent. This is more than saying that Network, like any cultural product, has aged. Instead, the methodology of shooting at the time: post-studio, but pre-digital, represented a precursor to reality TV. The look was grittier, more spontaneous, less controlled, less contrived. I think at the time these films looked naturalistic, and authentic, a rebellion against product shot on studio backlots. But to my eye now, they look like reality programming—mostly ugly.

Maybe Ben just likes that look. He has this Armenian film that he really likes. I believe he found it in the trash somewhere. To me it looked like an ABC after-school special from 1976, one of those "foreigners are just like us" type movies. In particular what made it seem old (although I believe it is recent) were the camera moves—few dollies, mostly tilts and pans, and the brownish color of everything.