Constraint does nothing (or just harms) if the reasons - what’s bad and what’s to avoid - are not understood.
But if one understands the reasons, they no longer need the constraint itself. It becomes a primitive crude limitation, missing any nuances. Like training wheels - needed for the first time(s) but after one learns how to balance they’re only making things worse.
Unless the constraint is for a tech demo (“watch how I can fit this into 64KiB”/“watch how I can shoot this without any filters” - cool but totally irrelevant to a consumer who doesn’t care about the making process itself) or if one doesn’t trust themselves and their environment.
Any constraint, including the ones you have no control over, are opportunities for creative solutions you wouldn’t have otherwise tried. It is massively relevant to the consumer, because the result of that situation is what they see.
A solution is something that requires a problem. In your concert example constraints were the source of problems (or few obvious steps from them, such as substandard instrument => weak bass notes => can’t perform as originally intended), requiring a solution. That’s pretty much straightforward. I agree with you here. Situations like this are exactly what you describe.
But I think it’s different with a manifesto that imposes various constraints for the sake of them, like we have here. The manifesto barely hints (I’m not even sure it does) about the actual issues.
Yes, if your original intent is flawed and only relies on a something that works if you can shove it under the rug with special effects, it would become comparable to the concert example. But it’s not the effects that are the issue!
Please correct me if I’m wrong - as I get it, making a movie is drastically different from performing an already planned piece at an event, it’s an iterative work. And if the team starts working on a film and thinks “okay, we want this, it’s typically done this way but {we have this constraint|it’s crappy approach because of this and that} - so how can we do it {without hitting the constraint|in some proper way}?” and they solve it then they don’t need the actual constraint anymore, because they’re past the point of that constraint. See how the bits in the curly brackets are interchangeable but only one is on point and another is just a distraction?
I don’t know a thing about playing music, but I suppose those improvisations no longer require a substandard piano? And maybe using those techniques when having a proper piano can improve things even further? (I could be wrong here, of course, analogies are complicated.)
Genuine or involuntary constraints require creative workarounds, that may succeed or fail, but this can’t be helped. However, artificial constraints, imposed voluntarily are surely different? Yes, it’s ultimately up to finding a hidden problem, as a part of finding the solution, but it’s so weird…
The constraints in Dogme were about removing the artificiality of filmmaking. I’m paraphrasing (it was a long time ago) but the question was, could they make compelling art using only natural light, ambient sound, etc? Film had become (and remains) so artificial that the medium itself seems to have been subsumed by technology.
I mean for gods sake they make special “paper” bags on movie sets that make less noise than real ones. Nothing you see or hear in a movie was created realistically, no matter how real it looks or sounds. https://kottke.org/23/03/how-noiseless-props-are-made-for-mo...
So in my opinion these constraints are about refocussing on the medium. They are not artificial, it’s just about getting back to basics. It’s actually about making film less artificial. About the skill of the people on set rather than those in post.
I don’t have a problem with the use of special effects, foley artists, sound engineers or anything else. It’s all good. But Dogme said, in part, let’s see if we can make good films without these things. And they did.
