The Condescension Of Pretension

What is pretension in film? In my view it's one of the worst things a film can do – it's really self-sabotaging in that it usually makes the audience feel condescended to, with that being rarely deliberate or effective.

Pretension and pretentiousness are of course subjective - there may not be universal truths surrounding pretension in movies, but I believe feelings surrounding condescension, self-indulgence, and pretentiousness are linked to perceptions of a film's or filmmaker's sincerity - perhaps not always, but often enough for the link to be made.

*Please note that although this was uploaded in 4k, its intended output was 1080 - YouTube's compression is so bad in HD that it looks a lot better watched in 2k or 4k, even through an HD TV or monitor, so I uploaded it as 4k*

Movies Mentioned:

Testament of Orpheus / Le testament d'Orphée (1960), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Lady In The Water (2006), Babel (2006), Synechdoche, New York (2008), The Human Centipede (2009), The Last Airbender (2010), Jupiter Ascending (2015), Serenity (2019)

Видео The Condescension Of Pretension канала Georg Rockall-Schmidt