We often hear the term “style over substance”, but what about the opposite...

We often hear the term “style over substance”, but what about the opposite? Are there any examples of movies that are “substance over style”?

Attached: 54864DF0-0E5E-46DC-9858-A566FA56A402.jpg (1300x845, 100K)

Before sunrise

huh, thats a good question

primer

Can't think of any movies off the top of my head, but the last two episodes of Evangelion, where they ran out of money and told the story largely through still images and concept art, are a pretty good example.

yeah this is kind of a stumper
i can't really think of a single example and it's bugging me

what about dinner with andre? literally 90 min of a 2 dudes talking in a restaurant, practically 0 style, quite a lot of substance

>anime
Well if we're posting anime and TV then there are a lot more options.

dons plum

Movies are a visual medium, so substance over style is way harder to do

>aka Good classic movies

All 3 Before Sunset films
Russian Ark

Anything with a complicated and clever plot that's delivered through convoluted lore dumps and expository dialogue. The Star Wars prequels for example, they've got a more clever plot than the original trilogy but its told to you rather than being shown to you.

Office Space
Groundhog Day
Bad Santa
Eric Rohmer's 6 Moral Tales
Patton

I don't particularly like the movie but Clerks

So it's impossible deliver substance through visual alone? Is the medium inherently unsuitable for delivering substance?

Clerks, the original one

Dogme 95 movies

What has more substance, a dry but brilliant philosophical treatise or a beautiful painting?

The public don't like substance, they think its boring.

Attached: Diogenes BY wATERHOUSE.jpg (834x1285, 232K)

kaufman kinos maybe, synecdoche, adaptation, anomalisa

Attached: 12834917982347912.jpg (753x1074, 136K)

But is it impossible to deliver substance through motion picture? This isn't a question of public reception.

It's not impossible at all. Many films have great substance. Your mistake is in thinking that style and substance are opposites, when the truth is that they work in conjunction and cannot be divorced from one another, merely emphasized or deemphasized in relation to one another. It's not that it's impossible to present substance in film, it's that any amount of presentation at all *is* style-- style is the means of communication, and substance the content.

When something is criticized as being style over substance, it doesn't mean that there is no substance to speak of, it means that the content is weak or disastisfying, while the artistic flourishes of the presentation are emphasized.