For movies to work as art, they must allow the audience some imaginative work so that they can collaborate in the construction of that work.
In true art forms, there is enough ambiguity and implicitness to avoid spoon-feeding the audience with information, since the latter would render them passive observers. This is partly a function of watching films chronologically, such that information must be passed-on in as easily-digestible a manner as possible - to aid comprehension. Unlike a book, cinemas offer no opportunity to go back over material not initially understood - the entire work has to be re-screened for this to occur. On the other hand, to leave the audience with no real work to do is to exploit them as if they were merely the punters at a pornographic film show: Those needing explicitness to solace their esthetic autism.
To overcome the inherency of the filmic medium, there must be a deliberate policy of separating what is presented on screen and what the representation is supposed to depict: The paradox of presenting something in plain view that is still ambivalent in meaning. This is something inherent in other art forms, but must be worked-at in film: Information must actually be removed, rather than simply not depicted in the first place.
Films can all-too-easily, in the hands of mediocre practitioners, suffocate their subjects by the mere fact of representing them - unlike painting, music, literature and radio drama - resulting in over-representation from too many details. The only exception to this gilding of the lily are black and white movies, whose sensory incompleteness engages the imagination of the viewer more fully than color, as a compensation for what is merely evoked by the artist: The fewer colors there are in the palette, the more the filmmaker can effectively evoke by other means; making black & white films often more emotionally-colourful than colour movies.
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