Discovery

The German film maker Werner Herzog (Kaspar Hauser - Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle/The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser; Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht/Nosferatu the Vampyre; Fitzcarraldo; etc.) says when he is directing an emotional scene he likes to film the actors from behind. An example is the scene in Nosferatu where Jonathan and Lucy Harker are together on the beach just before Jonathan leaves for Transylvania. They are walking away from the camera, in the middle distance. In a Hollywood film the tendency would be to shoot such a scene in close-up, to extract the maximum intensity (and to release more of the box-office value in the stars' faces, I suppose). But he says "I don't want to see the actors crying, I want to see the audience crying". So we live the emotional life of the characters rather than being fed it.

The painter Mark Rothko said that his purpose in making such large works was not to create something grand and impressive (as one might expect historically), but rather to create a feeling of intimate intensity.

To find an answer of genius you must first set off in the opposite direction.