Why HFR ruined the Hobbit:

Rating: 3/10 (31 December 2012)

I really tried to like the "new" 48fps – look of The Hobbit" and I was actually excited when I noticed the projector switched to HFR but all this self-motivation did not help. I thought one might adapt to it but it did not get any better during the 170 minute of the movie – so HFR really ruined the "Hobbit" completely. There is no doubt that the high frame rates appears to be more realistic and truer to live, more detailed. And as Douglas Trumbull experiments in the 80s did show the increased physical reaction of the audience to high frame rate images is measurable, but that is exactly the problem. Some people actually seem to like the thrill but that does not make it any better.For me there is a difference between a film and a video game. In cinema like in any other art form it's all about what happens in your head. In a book it's only words on a page that can create worlds, in theater you need nothing more than an actor and a few props on stage and in a movie theater its light on a screen in combination with sound and their only purpose is to trigger the imagination of the audience, because nothing can compete with that. That is the real art of cinema: To give the imagination just enough to fill all the gaps by itself. And the more unnecessary detail we throw on the screen the more we actually show the more we narrow down the space of the audience's imagination. And that's why as the saying goes: Cinema is bigger than live. To make it more real is to make it smaller. And the higher frame rate does increase this illusion of realism more than anything else. And the more the image tries to become real the more aware we become of the all other level of abstraction in cinema, may that be framing or composition, editing or even acting. And where does this strange music come from?
And that is exactly the impression I had with the Hobbit: It felt fake. In the Rivendale – sequence one could not help to be aware of the fact that we are in a studio all the time, the stylized soundtrack did not seem to match the image and even acting appeared to be fake although the actors in most cases proved be good movie actors But I don't want to be too pessimistic. After all it is not the technique that makes movies, its people. HFR like 3d is just another tool in the filmmakers toolbox, made more easily accessible by digital technique. But I think using HFR effectively would require a radical different way of filmmaking, even more so than with 3D. It will need a different kind of sound, of editing, of lighting, even screen writing. It would also require a different kind of acting. By using HFR a lot of old tools and techniques will lose their meaning. The question will be then: Do we win more than we lose? One day a filmmaker might come who knows how to use HFR to make his story even better like Ang Lee recently did with 3D. But today it's clear that this filmmaker is not Peter Jackson.
On the contrary he does not in the least seem to be aware of the implication of the technique he is working with. Not to mention 3D which does not help the story at all but is just another distracting technical gag – Compare this to for example to Ang Lees "Life of Pi"!. In addition to 3D and the high frame rate Peter Jackson seems to be obsessed with showing the audience as much details as possible. He works with a very high depth of field. Except for the close ups everything seems to be in focus and most of the film like the scenes at Gollum's pond are much too bright. The place completely loses its magic because you can see everything. This would have made sense if Peter Jackson wanted the audience to explore the image by themselves like for instance David Lean did in "Lawrence of Arabia". But he just changed the technique, makes the image sharper and puts more distracting details in every frame but as far as editing and framing is concerned he does more or less the exact same thing like in all his other movies: Fast editing, constantly moving cameras even the wide shots of landscapes have the same old cycling helicopter moves. In fact he is working against his picture aesthetics because he not only denies the audience the time to explore the mass of details in the picture, on the contrary he permanently tries to conceal important details for the purpose of storytelling. Already in the first sequence he shows the dragon attack but does not want us to see the dragon. As a consequence because he is working with high frame rate and therefore has less motion blur he has to shake the camera even more violently than with 24 frames per second to obscure the scenario So the new look of the film not only does NOT support the storytelling, on the contrary Peter Jackson fight its implications from the very first moment of the film. Jackson visual effect people and stage designers did a tremendous job but you pretty soon come to realize that it does not help a bit to be able to explore for example the texture of Bilbos green door in every detail when you try to be dive into the fantastic world of middle earth.