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)