Scott Sumner: preference

Transcript context

…Maybe I do too. Well, just the way my brain is wired, I’m much better at visual things than at verbal things. Probably listeners can already suspect that. When I look at film, I’m focusing mostly on the visual aspect of the film. That’s sort of hard to put into words. I think that a lot of people tend to look at film from the perspective of a screenplay. It’s sometimes said that cinema is about cinematography and TV is about screenplays. Right? People that are really interested in film tend to like movies a lot better than TV shows because the visual aspect comes to the fore. That’s what I look for in a film, is something that is visually interesting, that expresses artistic ideas in a visually compelling way, but I find it difficult to put into words exactly what that quality is because it’s just sort of intangible. You know it when you see it. Like there are certain directors that in the first 30 seconds of the film, you just see their signature visual style. A Wes Anderson film has a very distinctive visual style, David Lynch, and so on, but it isn’t just visuals. It’s the way visuals are combined with music and editing and dialogue that has made film such a rich art form during the 20th century especially. It combines all these things in a way that some other art forms by comparison seem a little more one-dimensional. I’m a big fan of all the visual arts including painting, but I think painting as an art form was kind of played out by the early 20th century. At least the visual ideas were exhausted and then goes into conceptual art and so on. Film, because it has all these different aspects combined together, was a very dynamic art form throughout much of the 20th century. I think that’s what especially drew me to film. Which is the best Hitchcock movie?…

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