Old is good. New is bad. The winning formula for a viral video essay.
I am noticing a lot of these videos popping up in my feed. I guess my complaints about those hard light videos made the algorithm decide I should be inundated with "modern movies suck" content.
They follow the same basic formula of "old = good" and "new = bad."
And if you watch them with only a surface level understanding of filmmaking and photography and how to author visuals, you will probably go, "Wow, what an amazing video!"
I get why people like these essays. And I understand there are genuine frustrations with how many modern movies are made.
And the video does have some interesting philosophical filmmaking explanations. I really enjoyed those aspects.
But there is something in the very thumbnail of this video that completely invalidates the overall premise.
The Premise: Old movies look more "real" than new movies.
The Evidence: Comparing one of the greatest movies of all time (Jaws), by one of the greatest directors of all time (Spielberg), to a franchise soft reboot cash grab.
Why not compare to Sinners? Why not compare to Weapons? Or Dune? Or The Brutalist?
Also, is realism always the goal?
What about Spider-Verse and KPop Demon Hunters? Does their unreality make them lesser?
This is how they bait you with these videos. They want you to buy into their nostalgic cherry picking. They don't elevate any modern films that look amazing. They pick their favorite movies from years ago and then compare them to the worst examples in the recent past.
But the thing I dislike the most is that problems are often blamed on artists. If artists were more competent and went back to the old school ways, movies would look better and more real.
Use hard lighting. Use practical effects. Use deep focus. Show and don't tell.
Individual quick fixes are never going to solve a systemic problem.
I assure you that directors and all of the artists involved in making movies would love to use every tool in the toolbox. They haven't forgotten these techniques. But most of the time these tools are not compatible with hyper-efficient filmmaking processes.
I liked his explanation of haptic visuals. To create artistic, textural scenes to help the world of the movie feel more lived in and real. That's a cool concept. But adding a few haptic scenes into Jurassic World isn't going to fix the story. It isn't going to improve the weak script. Hard lighting and deep focus aren't going to fix the systems that produce these risk-averse reboots of profitable IPs. It isn't going to fix the rushed, fix-it-in-post mentality that doesn't give CG artists enough time and resources to produce more realistic imagery.
But also, has he seen a Vince Gilligan show?
Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and now Pluribus have some amazing haptic visuals. It seems like he is ignoring more modern examples to sell the story that things were "better" in the distant past.
This hurts the filmmakers who are creating legitimately beautiful work. And it also ignores the fact that bad, ugly movies have always existed.
Jaws was released in 1975.
Of the 216 movies released that year, I have seen a total of 5.
Only 5 movies from that year stood the test of time. 211 movies are completely ignored when assessing how real and aesthetically pleasing movies used to look.
That is textbook survivorship bias.
Have you seen the classic 1975 cinematic masterpiece... The Happy Hooker?
Let's compare the visuals of The Happy Hooker to Sinners.
It's not a fair fight.
But when you compare Jaws to Sinners...
You can see the quality is not dependent on when the movies are made. It is dependent on a director with a strong vision and a large team of artists who are passionate about their craft.
If you have to resort to this level of nostalgic cherry picking to prove your point, I don't think your argument is very strong.
And I also think some of this appeal to nostalgia contributes to the very problems people are frustrated by.
The top grossing movies of 2024 had no original stories.
That isn't to say there weren't original stories released. But they are often harder to find. They aren't marketed well. And, sadly, people don't go to the theater to support them. The online discourse spends more time talking about how much better movies used to be and there is no discourse championing said original stories.
When the capitalists that fund movies hear this hyper-nostalgic discourse, the least risky option seems to be "Let's just remake the thing they loved. Let's reboot it. Let's add a sequel."
There are so many beautiful movies and shows being made. But if you watch all of these essays it really seems like everything looks like garbage and artists don't know what they are doing.
And these essayists don't seem to have any practical experience authoring images. They read a book. They listened to a podcast. They heard a famous cinematographer make an offhand remark in an interview... "Man, I really miss deep focus in movies."
Suddenly, shallow depth of field is the enemy and they need to let the people know that deep focus will make movies look better. ALERT ALL OF THE MOVIE NERD INFLUENCERS!
They say that movies all look like iPhone Portrait mode.
I'm sure the ghost of Stanley Kubrick will be pleased to know his famous candlelight scenes in Barry Lyndon look like a gimmick smartphone feature.
This video and others like it say that "deep focus" is never used in modern movies.
To prove their point, once again, they mine their nostalgia and select one of the best movies of all time by one of the greatest directors of all time.
In this case, their past example is North by Northwest by Alfred Fucking Hitchcock.
And their modern counterexample?
A Megan Fox Netflix movie called Subservience.
Here is the rub...
They don't actually know what deep focus is.
They probably googled it and got North by Northwest as a genuine example and thought, "Oh, deep focus is when everything is in focus."
They confused deep depth of field with deep focus.
And while deep focus *requires* a deep depth of field, it is not synonymous with deep depth of field.
When you look at their other examples, their misunderstanding reveals itself.
This is deep depth of field.
This was a technical decision more than an artistic one. They are shooting in midday sun. The sun is extremely bright and so you have to stop down the lens to a small aperture—which causes deep depth of field.
He is assigning an artistic intention to a technical limitation.
Deep focus is a deliberate artistic compositional choice that often has to fight technical limitations to be achieved.
When you are designing a shot for deep focus, it means the shot is reliant on subjects being in focus even if they are far apart. So the director may need the foreground and midground or the foreground and background to be in focus. And if these multiple planes are not in focus, there will be a loss of narrative or artistic information.
It's easier to show you.
Pluribus (a modern show, OMG!) recently had a beautiful deep focus shot.
If they were completely blurred out, it would change the entire composition. Note they are not perfectly sharp. They don't need to be. They are just sharp enough to give weight to both the foreground and midground. In this frame, the buildings in the background could be blurred and it would still be deep focus.
This photo I took of Otis is deep focus.
I'm telling a story with the composition.
Dog wants the ball. You can see his desire for the ball. Nothing else exists in this moment but that ball. He must have the ball.
If Otis was blurred out, it would change the story of the shot.
Now we are focused only on the ball and there is a blurred figure lurking in the distance. The ball is afraid. The ball feels isolated and scared of being chewed and slobbered on.
It's not that deep focus is better. Or that shallow focus is worse. Both techniques give artists the ability to tell different stories.
This is deep depth of field.
This shot could work with a shallow depth of field. There would be no narrative information lost if I had blurred the background.
It might not work as well aesthetically, but you aren't losing important storytelling information.
The two best examples of cinematic deep focus are Citizen Kane and Kurosawa films.
If you watch this scene with the speech, the composition is created so you can see him giving his speech and you can also clock all of the expressions of the people behind him.
Seeing their reactions is important narrative information that would be lost if they were blurred by shallow DOF.
He does this throughout the movie.
Another sign of deep focus is the effort involved to get everything in decent focus. Creating the blocking is more complicated. You have to spend time to make sure everything lines up correctly. You may have to build out sets to a high degree of detail to accommodate the shot. If the environment is dark, it's difficult to close down the aperture enough to get foreground and background elements in focus. So you may need creative lighting design to make sure everyone is exposed properly.
You have to specifically design the shot and work with the camera and lighting folks to pull it off.
If the shot still works if you were to blur the background, it isn't deep focus. Here is another example they showed.
This gives you a great sense of the environment. It is well composed. But it's bright and sunny. Closing down the aperture is not only trivial, it is necessary to get a proper exposure. And if the sky were blurred out, I don't think it would change the storytelling of the composition.
In this scene from a Kurosawa film, deep focus is vital.
The foreground subject is restrained and struggling. The midground subjects are guarding him. And there is a dark figure far in the background approaching.
Deliberate deep depth of field helps build an aesthetic and sense of environment.
Deep focus helps tell a story.
But is shallow depth of field the villain?
In this example from the video, you can see out the window. They were probably using bright lights and it was just easier to use a small aperture.
Does seeing a dumpster out of the window help this scene aesthetically or narratively?
If this is an emotional moment, it might actually be better to blur the background and draw more focus to his expressions. Some may get distracted and think, "Is that a dumpster next to his head?" The performance becomes less immersive and that could hurt the narrative intent.
Now the frame is less busy and distracting. You are drawn to his expression.
Shallow depth of field is an important tool in cinema. It creates subject separation, removes distractions, and draws focus to emotional moments.
Yes, it is sometimes used for efficient filmmaking. It is more expensive to build a detailed set or go to a fancy location. You don't have to do all of the planning required for deep focus shots. Just blur the background and move on to the next scene.
But that is not artistic incompetence. That is an artistic limitation created by a system that prioritizes efficiency.
I'd love to see more deep focus in modern movies. I'd love to see less bland lighting design. I'd love to see more practical effects. And I love how much we can learn from the past.
But this toxic nostalgia is keeping us stuck in a world of reboots. Ignoring the beautiful movies made in the present perpetuates the very problems these essays fear. And blaming artists instead of systems is hurting the people who can craft the better visuals we desire.
CG artists are the best example. When the discourse says that CGI sucks, they are not valued. They are overworked and underpaid. They are denied a proper union. Good CG visuals are dependent on having the time and resources to craft them.
When we appeal to nostalgia and say "practical effects are better than CGI," the studios add a few more practical effects and hide any evidence of the 3000 CGI shots also in the film. They hide all the blue screens in the BTS shots by making them gray.
You can express a desire for more practical effects without pitting them against CGI.
And you can express your disappointment in CG visuals by saying, "I wish the artists were given more time to do their best work."
Systems are limiting artists. And I think the best way to change those systems is to elevate original modern content that prioritizes skilled crafting of storytelling and aesthetics.
I think these essays spend too much time on what they don't like and not enough time celebrating what they do like. They do surface level research that leads to fundamental misunderstandings of the filmmaking process.
It's just... pretentious CinemaSins.
If you want to watch some quality video essays on filmmaking, I highly recommend Patrick Willems. He has actually crafted films. He has practical experience authoring visuals. He does extensive research and I think his criticisms of modern filmmaking are much more robust and practical. He is great at showing appreciation for the history of cinema while still showing love for well crafted modern movies.
Pretty much the Terrence Malick of YouTube.
All videos directed by Patrick Willems
Send any mail to:
Patrick Willems
P.O. Box 380333
Broo
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The Geometry of Anguish: Robert Krasker’s Noir and the Ghost of Gregg Toland in Odd Man Out
When Roman Polanski cites a film as his favourite, it is worth examining not just the narrative, but the architecture of the image. In Odd Man Out (1947), director Carol Reed and cinematographer Robert Krasker constructed a Belfast that exists somewhere between documentary realism and expressionist nightmare. While Reed’s later collaboration with Krasker on The Third Man (1949) is rightfully celebrated for its zither-scored, tilted-angle Viennese paranoia, Odd Man Out is the more audacious technical achievement. It is a film where the camera does not merely observe a man’s physical deterioration but becomes the physical manifestation of his fractured psyche. Central to understanding its visual language is recognizing the shadow of a cinematic giant: Gregg Toland.
By 1947, Gregg Toland was the most revered cinematographer in Hollywood, fresh off his revolutionary deep-focus work in Citizen Kane (1941) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Toland’s philosophy was one of radical inclusion—using wide-angle lenses, immense depth of field, and complex lighting to force the viewer to engage with the entirety of the frame, suggesting that a character’s environment was as psychologically significant as their face. Robert Krasker, an Australian working in Britain, absorbed this Toland-esque grammar but inverted its purpose. Where Toland used deep focus to democratize space (allowing the foreground and background to compete for meaning), Krasker used it to isolate.
Odd Man Out follows Johnny McQueen (James Mason), a wounded Irish nationalist, staggering through the snow-covered streets of Belfast after a botched robbery. Krasker’s cinematography is the engine of the film’s existential dread. From the opening shot, he establishes a city that is a labyrinth. Working with Reed, Krasker employs the Toland trademarks: the aggressive use of wide-angle lenses that distort space and the relentless deep focus that keeps Johnny’s tormenters sharp in the background while his own face looms, desperate, in the foreground.
Yet, Krasker’s genius lies in how he adapts Toland’s techniques for the noir idiom. Toland’s deep focus was about clarity and the overwhelming weight of reality; Krasker’s deep focus is about the impossibility of escape. In the film’s most stunning sequences—particularly the harrowing scene in the abandoned tenement where Johnny is hidden by the artist Lukey (Robert Newton)—Krasker uses depth of field to create a visual metaphor for the soul’s fragmentation. Johnny lies in the foreground, fading in and out of consciousness, while Lukey obsessively paints him in the background. Krasker keeps both planes in razor-sharp focus simultaneously. We are forced to witness the commodification of Johnny’s suffering while Johnny himself slips away. It is a Toland-esque frame, but the emotional effect is uniquely Kraskerian: claustrophobic rather than liberating.
The influence of Toland is most palpable in Krasker’s lighting design. Toland revolutionized the use of “practical” light sources (lamps, windows) to motivate shadows. In Odd Man Out, light is never neutral. It is a character with malevolent intent. Krasker lights Belfast as a series of harsh, geometric traps. The shadows aren’t just noirish atmosphere; they are bars on a cage. As Johnny stumbles from the kindness of strangers (the barmaid, the drunk, the prostitute) to the cruelty of others, Krasker uses the high-contrast chiaroscuro that Toland perfected to delineate moral ambiguity. Notice how the police, when they appear, are often silhouettes—figures of implacable authority rather than men. Notice how Kathleen Ryan’s character, the devoted Kathleen, seems to carry her own source of light in a sea of oppressive darkness, a rare visual reprieve that recalls the angelic framing Toland used for women in Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath.
However, Krasker diverges from Toland in his use of the camera’s mobility. Toland, working with Orson Welles, favored long takes that allowed actors to move through the deep space he created. Krasker, in Odd Man Out, utilizes a restless, searching camera. Early in the film, the camera moves with the gang as they case the mill; later, it lurches and sways with the wounded Johnny. This is not the static, objective deep focus of Toland; it is a subjective, hallucinatory deep focus. Krasker’s lens becomes a surrogate for Johnny’s fading consciousness. The wide-angle distortions (faces bulging, corridors stretching into infinity) are Toland’s technical vocabulary applied to a psychological purpose Toland rarely explored. Krasker makes the world itself look sick.
The film’s climax, set in the snow-covered dockyard, serves as a thesis statement for Krasker’s interpretation of Toland’s legacy. Reed and Krasker stage the finale with a spatial clarity that Toland would have admired, yet the environment—stark white snow against pitch-black shadows—feels less like reality and more like a Beckettian stage. The camera pulls back to a wide, deep-focus master shot as Johnny and Kathleen meet their fate. We see the police, the priests, the crowd, and the two lovers in the same frame. It is objective, cold, and geometrically precise. In this moment, Krasker proves he has mastered Toland’s ability to orchestrate space, but he uses that mastery to underscore a bleak, fatalistic worldview that is purely his own.
In the pantheon of classic cinema, The Third Man is often celebrated for its style, but Odd Man Out is the purer text. Without the gimmick of the tilted Dutch angles (which Krasker would deploy so famously in Vienna), Odd Man Out relies on a more sophisticated integration of Gregg Toland’s deep-focus revolution. Krasker doesn’t just frame Johnny McQueen; he traps him. He constructs a world of immense spatial depth that offers no exit, proving that the greatest achievement of the cinematographer is not merely to show us a setting, but to build a philosophy. In Odd Man Out, Robert Krasker took the grammar of Toland—the deepest focus, the starkest contrast—and used it to compose one of cinema’s most enduring images: the portrait of a man who can see his entire fate laid out before him, from the foreground to the horizon, with no way to change it.
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