The Decade in Cinematography

[Saul Rodgar]

it's strange that he talk only about American cinema.

 

My simplest explanation for US-centrism is: "If you lived here, you would understand." :P

 

Seriously now, I agree, definitely there are some awesome looking pictures from around the world. Too many to list though . . .

Edited November 26, 2009 by Saul Rodgar

[Rob Vogt]

We did mention foreign films though such as House of Flying Daggers, 2046, In The Mood For Love, City of God, Pan's Labyrinth, ect- there's obviously many more, but you say what you've seen and that's the best you can do.

 

Oldboy, Oasis, Irreversible, Lagaan, also come to mind.

[Keith Walters]

Oldboy, Oasis, Irreversible, Lagaan, also come to mind.

Whatever happened to Jan von Krogh? :rolleyes:

[David Mullen ASC]

it's strange that he talk only about American cinema.

i think i the world cinema there are same great great things

like Asia cinema - park Chan woke-takashi miike-tsai ming liang and many more

and the master from europe like bella tar-lars von terir

and young director from Mexico- Carlos Reygadas

and the master from Turkey- Nuri Bilge Ceylan

 

I can only comment on movies that I've seen, and I haven't seen some of those movies.

[A. Whitehouse]

Great list, so glad to see style discussed on this forum again. A few films that come up for me a lot and I thought I'd mention.

 

In the cut

Amores Perros

Hero

Requim for a Dream

The Royal Tennenbaums

Dumplings

Traffic

Songs from the second floor

Kingdom of Heaven

Zodiac

 

2000 was a bumper year I thought. There's so many that we'll still be watching for decades to come. Its incredible how much more episodic television people I work with are watching now. In 2000 episodic drama was being choked to death by first generation Reality TV shows.

Editing has changed more than anything else in the last ten years I think. What was considered quick cut ten years ago would seem medium pace these days.

 

Love to see more European films mentioned. "Le fils" maybe?

[Guest Trevor Swaim]

I would just like to add a film by Ki-duk Kim. "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring" in 2003 was a beautifully shot film from South Korea.

[Ram Shani]

"I can only comment on movies that I've seen, and I haven't seen some of those movies."

 

so you better start :)

you don't know what you missing:)

 

the problem is the more you work the less you see movies at list for me so i happy for the time i have small projects:)

[Guest Billy Furnett]

I enjoyed the contributions of Asian cinema in this decade.

 

There are tons that could be in this list, but to only name a few:

 

 

ELECTRIC DRAGON 80,000 V (2001) - Japan

Director: Sogo Ishii

Director of photography: Norimichi Kasamatsu

Reasons: B&W, Cinematography, Lighting, Soundtrack.

Trailer:

 

 

DOLLS (2002) - Japan

Director: Takeshi Kitano

Director of Photography: Katsumi Yanagijima

Reasons: Cinematography, Dramatic story elements.

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2s5CMVfVNc

 

 

OLD BOY (2003) - S. Korea

Director: Chan-wook Park

Director of Photography: Chung-hoon Chung

Reasons: Cinematography, Lighting.

Trailer:

 

 

FENG SHUI- (2004) – Philippines

Director: Chito S. Roño

Director of photography: Neil Daza

Reason: Lighting.

Trailer:

 

 

BROTHERHOOD OF WAR (2004) – S. Korea

Director: Kang Je-gyu

Director of Photography: Park Gok-Ji & Jeog Jin-hee

Reasons: Cinematography, Editing.

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YppcjiC-yc...feature=related

 

 

THE CELLO (2005) – S. Korea

Director: Lee Woo-cheol

Director of photography: Gwon Yeong-cheol

Reason: Cinematography, Lighting

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49ynbD37BWk

 

 

HANSEL AND GRETEL (2007) – S. Korea

Director: Pil-Sung Yim

Director of Photography: Ji-yong Kim

Reasons: Cinematography, Lighting, Set design and decoration.

Trailer:

 

QUICKIE EXPRESS (2007) - Indonesia

Director: Dimas Djayadingrat

Director of Photography: Roy Lolang

Reasons: Cinematography, Quirky cheap laughs

Trailer:

 

 

CYBORG SHE (My girlfriend is a cyborg) (2008) - Japan

Director: Kawak Jae-yong

Director of Photography: Junichrio Hayashi

Reasons: Juggles sci fi/action/comedy/romance in a decent story that looks good.

Trailer:

 

 

:)

[Adrian Sierkowski]

I would just like to add a film by Ki-duk Kim. "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring" in 2003 was a beautifully shot film from South Korea.

 

 

+1 on this film. A friend of mine gave me his copy (which I think he nicked from Blockbuster) and I was very impressed.

[Thaddeus Pope]

Here’s a few more – some have been mentioned already, but are worth mentioning again. ;)

 

The Wind That Shakes the Barley

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Slumdog Millionaire

The Man Who Wasn't There

Good Night and Good luck

Road to Perdition

Requiem for a Dream

Control

Mulholland Drive

Chopper

The Pianist

Donnie Darko

Amélie

Sin City

Kill Bill: Vol. 1

Billy Elliot

City of God

Oldboy

Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Pans Labyrinth

The Royal Tenenbaums

The Assassination of Jesse James

No Country for Old Men

There Will Be Blood

Zodiac

 

I’m looking forward to watching Gomorrah – I heard that the cinematography was pretty special.

[Thaddeus Pope]

Zatôichi (2003) was also very good.

[Gary Lemson]

Once---2006. Image acquistion on HVR-Z1s. Digital artifacts all over this one, but the story telling was well done.

 

Vitas--2006.

[Edgar Dubrovskiy]

+1 on this film. A friend of mine gave me his copy (which I think he nicked from Blockbuster) and I was very impressed.

 

Ki-duk Kim's '3-Iron' is amazing.

[Robert Costello]

Two movies worth mentioning in the decade:

 

Winged Migration

 

Inland Empire

[Edgar Dubrovskiy]

Would also add Tarsem Singh's 'The Fall'.

[Tom Lowe]

I agree that this has been Deakins' decade, but it also saw the rise of Lubezki, with films like Y Tu Mama, Children of Men, and The New World.

 

The decade saw the ultimate rise (and fall?) of Doyle, starting with 2000's absolute masterpiece of cinematography, In the Mood for Love and continuing through with 2046. It seemed Doyle was finally on top of the world, but then he began to fizzle in the mid and later part of the decade, IMO.

 

Right around that time, Rodrigo Prieto picked up the ball up and ran with it, with films like Brokeback, Babel, Lust Caution, and State of Play. Seems to me like Prieto is just getting started!

[Vincent Sweeney]

I'm not a fan of the whole (ab)use of CGI that is going on at the moment(Avatar, etc).....I hope that the big studios look at lists like this one and see that the future does not lie in a computer. Imo that technology is there as an additional tool to film making.

...

 

Avatar may be the first movie to really need entire CG environments to support it's story, so try looking at it that way for a moment. A perfect opposite to Episode I in many ways? Seems strange to me how someone like Cameron, who is obviously a life-dedicated and talented movie maker, can put several years into developing something revolutionary in the film world, and how quickly people like to put it down without understanding even a little about what was put into it and why.

[K Borowski]

BUMP.

 

 

Now it is time to talk about this subject ;-)

[Justin Hayward]

BUMP.

 

 

Now it is time to talk about this subject ;-)

 

Well, technically there is no year zero so ten counts as the end of the decade. Meaning 2011 is when we should start the convo. But, nobody cared in 1999, so… :P

 

I’m curious if this heavily manipulated post look (de-saturated, color manipulation - they’re talking about in another thread) will define this decade. Like when they got their hands on the zoom for the first time in the seventies. Will these sort of commercial/music video styles be something that looks dated in ten years?

[K Borowski]

So, just as with millenia (2001 is the first year of the new millenium, not 2000), a decade starts on the first year, not the zeroth?

 

 

Interesting, I thought it may have been that way with millenia, but not with decades. I know some music stations on XM were playing music from 1960 on the '50s station, but I have a feeling they probably were stretching into 1950 too.

 

Maybe there are fiascos at holiday parties where the '50s and '60s station DJs get in fights over who has fair claim to these years.

 

 

IDK. I don't like 10-year groupings, personally, because there are often several discrete groups of movements. Look at the '70s. They are known for disco, but certainly weren't dominated by it until the very end of the decade.

[K Borowski]

[tried to edit this in to my last post] Not to nit-pick what you said too much, Justin, but the zoom was around, I think even in the '50s. It became over-used in the '60s.

 

The 2000s to me, are fragmented. The early 2000s are really no different than the late 1990s. It wasn't until the mid 2000s that the DI took off. Up until that point it was the "chemical manipulation" era, with bleach bypasses galore, flashing/fogging, filtration, push-processing. There seemed to be a need to create a distinct look, maybe more for the eye-candy in trailers than some of the actual movies themselves.

 

I have missed out a lot on some of the years in-between, but I notice a distinct ending of an era around '02-'03, the start of another in '04-'05 (although we had DIs in 1998 with "Pleasantville" and "O Brother Where Art Thou), and perhaps the beginning of something else, now with things like digital, 3D, and IMAX all vying for attention. Unfortunately, the 2000s were/are (with the 2011 start of the new decade) the death knell of the optical finish. I doubt we'll ever again see a finished-on-film epic like "There Will Be Blood."

 

Even if there is a director or DOP that wants to go that route, I've noticed that the labs with the proper equipment are dismantling it.

 

 

Now, as for "dated" looks, I think someone else here pointed out the rapid camera movements all throughout "Star Trek." That and the persistent shakey-cam looked "dated" when I saw it. I really hope it is something that cinematographers will move past, except for short shots for dramatic effect. Things like 24fps and film grain may also become dated if more people embrace digital. I think film projection itself is going to become very niche, not through any fault of its own, but through sloppy work on making release prints and low-quality DIs.

Edited January 1, 2010 by Karl Borowski

[David Mullen ASC]

Obviously it's an arbitrary division, by decade, and as long as it covers 10 years, I'm not sure it matters whether you start at 2000, 1999, or 2001 -- since it is arbitrary. However, that doesn't mean it isn't useful to look at trends within a 10-year span, or any span that is long enough to show one major trend transitioning into another one. But clearly we could have talked about 1995-2005 instead if we wanted to.

 

If you want to divide the period up by trends, I suppose the end of photochemical finishing is one transition, the beginning of digital cinematography for features is another, etc.

 

We haven't had the sort of abrupt transitions like we had when sound was introduced though. The transition to digital in all aspects has been ongoing for more than a decade and will keep going on for another decade probably. 3D is certainly nothing new. On the other hand, the demise of film for TV production has been rather artificially accelerated in the past year but as long as movies are being shot on film, some TV shows will continue to opt for film.

 

Stylistically, I think cinematography is still in the post-Storaro/Willis era where low-key naturalism is the dominant style; before them, there were plenty of high-key studio movies and TV shows being made. But our definitions of naturalism and realism keep shifting with every generation.

 

As I said before, I think we've entered an "anything goes" sort of period where all styles are embraced to some extent -- high-contrast, low-contrast, diffused, sharp, saturated, desaturated, etc. though notions of "realism" still dominate. Maybe it reflects the fragmented nature of commercial art appealing to micro markets.

[Justin Hayward]

Not to nit-pick what you said too much, Justin, but the zoom was around, I think even in the '50s. It became over-used in the '60s.

 

Right, thanks. And I was just kidding about the proper decade stuff... :D

 

How about the squeezed shutter for fight or battle scenes? I guess the trend became popular in 1998 with Saving Private Ryan, but it really hasn’t lost traction since.

 

Not to mention the sped up to super slo-mo bits that were made popular a year later with The Matrix. I mean, that trick made its way into freak’n Sherlock Holmes. Most impressive.

[Brian Rose]

What a decade! At midnight on January 1st, 2000, I was working the closing shift behind the concession counter at a the local megaplex. With all the fears over Y2K, and being just a freshman in high school, I gotta admit I was a little worried that I was going to leave work to enter a society in collapse. Of course, I was wrong. That never happened. Instead I went home, and everything went on as it did before. Then again, I was wrong about that too.

 

I worked at that theater because I loved movies. But at that age, it never entered my mind that I could be a part of that business, that I had anything worth saying. I grew up in a suburb where status, money, material possessions were everything. You were defined by your income and the square footage of your house, and this was reflected in my education. I went to a public school that was largely unconcerned with such silly things as art and creativity and helping me discover what I WANTED to do. We studied to become doctors, lawyers, expert test takers. It was all a game, and the prize was a scholarship to a name school. As I recall, my career aptitude test said I was best suited to be either a Business Machines Tech or a systems analyst. No joke.

 

In 2001 two things happened. First, I saw Pearl Harbor, an appalling cinematic waste on every level. I left that theater thinking, "If they're willing to give a guy 150,000,000 and THAT's what he comes up with, surely I can do better." It was a cocky, arrogant thing to think, but then again, Pearl Harbor was THAT bad. The second thing was 9/11. I was not in New York. I didn't know anyone who died that day. In fact, I didn't even see any of it on TV until after it was all over. But it affected me all the same. Here was an event in which 3000 people were murdered, and the only thing they were guilty of was being to work on time. I began to think about what I was doing with my life, and why these standardized tests and animal dissections and analysis of "A Separate Peace" mattered. And I realized they didn't matter, at least, not to me.

 

And so I started study film. I began buying DVDs. Citizen Kane, Lawrence of Arabia, Ran. If I couldn't find it, I downloaded it. I started to write scripts. Some were no more than a page of dialogue. Looking back, they were pretty damn bad. But they were a start.

 

I started making my own little movies as a senior. First, I used a borrowed digital camera to make an animated piece about rubik's cubes. Then I started to play with super 8. My first 16mm was a windup Bolex Reflex. My college, despite having no film program, had a nice library of old production books, and a few cameras to check out, giving me my first taste of digital video.

 

God, the screw ups I made! I didn't have a firewire card, so I initially ripped my DV footage to DVD using a school computer, and then ripped the DVD to my computer. The resuls were less than stellar. I bought an Eclair, but f'd up a whole roll of film because I didn't form the loops right. But all the same, I loved it. I directed a few shorts, and tried a feature. And with each, my favorite part was running camera.

 

As a grad, I studied film full time, shot other people's films, and bought my first digital camera, an XL2. As a postgrad I was hired, fired, and rehired (albeit as a freelancer).

 

Like David, my assessment of this decade is mixed. I believe this will be regarded as the decade when digital came into its own. Not just as a poor, cheap substitute for film, but something with real quality, and artistic potential that makes it a medium unto itself.

 

Cinematography as an art form saw both peaks and valleys. I agree with another poster in that I believe this is Roger Deakin's decade. We lost Conrad Hall, but Deakins fills the void, and he has made so many films of truly stunning beauty.

 

Wally Pfister did wonderful things as well, and he will forever have my admiration for helping to reaffirm the viability of large format photography.

 

I also think David Mullens deserves a lot of credit for being a huge force. His incredible contributions to this board have been invaluable, and I can only wonder how many great, beautiful films will come to be in the ensuing years and decades because their DPs were advised by David. I hope your career continues on its upward path, and that someday you will receive the ULTIMATE honor for your work.

 

As I alluded to earlier, there were also valleys. DI has become a fantastic tool in the right hands, but in the wrong ones had yielded films that were almost unwatcheable, with funky colors and tones. "Payback" comes to mind, with its annoying icy blue tone.

 

The shaky cam went from being "real" and "immeidate" to cliche, and sadly now has become as much a staple as the "over the shoulder shot."

 

Editors have taken lovely long takes and chopped them up into incoherence, and shallow focus has strangely become the hallmark of professionalism. All my buddies looking to buy HD cameras plan on getting adapters and 35mm lenses so they can have the "film look" the filmic "depth of field." As they talk, I wonder if they even understand what depth of field is, or why they feel the need to rack focus every shot?

 

This decade reminded me of just how masterful the old greats were. The technicolor cameramen who shot glorious colour using a system that was the equivalent of ASA 5 film.

 

This year, we lost Jack Cardiff, my beau ideal. I was fortunate enough to correspond with him a few times, and to tell him how important his work was to me. So, he died knowing that there WERE young people who cared about his work. He was 94 when he died, and still, it was a tragedy to loose such a man who carried such history and knowledge in him.

 

I've tried to learn as much as I can this decade. I keep making films, though none thus far have mattered in the slightest. This decade, I hope I shall at least come closer to making a truly wonderful film, whethe as a director, or as a DP.

 

I've been a member of this forum for several years now, and I owe so much. I hope to someday find a way to give back.

 

Brian Rose