This is art, not communications. Are you saying the viewer should force an artist not to follow his muse?
Art is a form of communication. If the artist cannot manage to convey meaning to the audience, then it’s nothing but a private form of art.
And this is broadcast on HBO. Made for broadcast, as a matter of fact. There are characters, plot, all those things. The whole point of it is to tell a story to viewers. If those viewers cannot follow the story because the artist’s vision was unclear or deliberately obfuscated, the fault lies not with the audience but with the artist.
If an artists vision is to be conveyed to others (and the fact that this was shown on TV and extensively advertised in an effort to draw an audience shows that it was), the artist absolutely must take that audience into account. We act as though an artist’s vision is sacrosanct- it’s not, and it’s ESPECIALLY not in a medium where there’s more than one person working on it. OK, this is the cinematographer. There’s also actors. Writers. Effects folks. Props. Costumes. And so on. A lot of people had a lot put into this. Do their visions matter? Their work? Because I’m seeing a cinematographer with a remarkably elitist view of how this is to be consumed. Well, that’s not shared by the people who owned it, else it wouldn’t have been viewable on substandard gear.
Lack of clarity is always the fault of the person who is sending the message. Either that person did not frame it properly, transmit it usefully, or any of a number of other things that contributed to the miscommunication.
In this instance, we see someone blaming the audience because the audience was not informed beforehand of the ground rules for this particular communication. Wrong screen, wrong settings, wrong configuration, whatever. And now it’s their fault because they weren’t on the same page with some inexplicable “artist’s vision?” Baloney.
