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Qrazy
12-15-2007, 02:29 AM
I have a very general question about film aesthetic and texture. How do cinematographers and directors achieve such vastly different aesthetics in relation to other cinematographers and why do regional differences often seem to have such a striking effect on aesthetic?

Obviously some of this has to do with composition, staging and lighting, but even with these in mind it doesn't seem to account for the range of aesthetics... or perhaps the lighting does, I don't know, but why are there such regional similarities? Do they use a particular film stock that can only be found regionally? Is it types of cameras? Lenses?

For instance, compare some Japanese films by Ichikawa, Kobayashi, Suzuki, etc to Russian work by Kalotozov, Tarkovsky, Sokurov, etc. I find it highly likely that most, perhaps all of us would be able to identify from a frame or a few frames of a film, the region or close to the region the film came from.

Even regional differences aside, how do filmmakers achieve such widely varying aesthetics? For instance, the grainy feeling of a great deal of Herzog and Pasolini contrasted with the softer aesthetic of early Truffaut and Varda.

We all know and can pinpoint differences between German expressionism, Italian neo-realism, etc and so forth... but what of cinematic texture? Regional aesthetic congruence? Aside from general interest I'm particularly interested in these questions so that I can recreate these varying aesthetics and I'm curious how much is dependent on specific types of cameras and film stock vs. lighting and composition... and any other factors I may not even know about.