I don’t think Williams is saying anything wrong but I disagree with him.
Let’s look at this a different way. Copyright aside, what if I opened an art gallery which presented still frames from cinema. Would that not be a valid exploitation of the medium? I think people love cinematography and it holds up as its own art… And so does film score
I think the gallery you describe can still fit with what he’s saying, whether either of us agree with him. I would say that the gallery is not an expression of film as a medium since you’re removing the fundamental components of time and motion from it. It becomes an expression of photography made with unconventional methods, I think.
In the same way that an excellent film score does not necessarily stand alone as an excellent piece of music, a frame from a movie could be absolutely perfect in its role as part of a shot but uninteresting by itself in isolation. The score wasn’t intended to go without the film, just like the frame wasn’t intended to go without the rest of the shot. Maybe they do turn out to be interesting by themselves but it’s at least partly a coincidence if it happens
I think that analogy works well in his defence though. The “medium” you are expressing would be photography, and I think it would be very likely to be photography of much lower quality than that taken by dedicated still photographers. That’s a natural consequence of the fact that each individual frame is not being composed for the purpose of viewing in isolation, but to be viewed for one twenty-fourth of a second as part of a moving, dynamic film production, along with an audio soundtrack of dialogue, music, and foley.
I don’t think Williams is saying anything wrong but I disagree with him.
Let’s look at this a different way. Copyright aside, what if I opened an art gallery which presented still frames from cinema. Would that not be a valid exploitation of the medium? I think people love cinematography and it holds up as its own art… And so does film score
I think the gallery you describe can still fit with what he’s saying, whether either of us agree with him. I would say that the gallery is not an expression of film as a medium since you’re removing the fundamental components of time and motion from it. It becomes an expression of photography made with unconventional methods, I think.
In the same way that an excellent film score does not necessarily stand alone as an excellent piece of music, a frame from a movie could be absolutely perfect in its role as part of a shot but uninteresting by itself in isolation. The score wasn’t intended to go without the film, just like the frame wasn’t intended to go without the rest of the shot. Maybe they do turn out to be interesting by themselves but it’s at least partly a coincidence if it happens
I think that analogy works well in his defence though. The “medium” you are expressing would be photography, and I think it would be very likely to be photography of much lower quality than that taken by dedicated still photographers. That’s a natural consequence of the fact that each individual frame is not being composed for the purpose of viewing in isolation, but to be viewed for one twenty-fourth of a second as part of a moving, dynamic film production, along with an audio soundtrack of dialogue, music, and foley.