The Images of 2003 Will Linger It was the Year of the Cinematographer By Elvis Mitchell It's still a tossup whether 2003 was a great year for American movies. But there's no argument that it was one of the most gratifying years for cinematography, and not just the eye-catching, high-contrast color gloss that often passes for great camerawork but would be better relegated to press-on nails. Much of the most impressive imagery was in some of the most provocative films. Gus Van Sant's Elephant, photographed by Harris Savides, was made in a style that could best be described as autumn-afternoon languorous: The camera pokes in and out of classrooms, hallways and school grounds, as if it were a student trying to catch up with a friend. Elephant uses a stylized, near-square frame, the boxy aspect ratio that was standard for movies until the 1950's and that's more familiar today from television. This comfortable throwback framing mutes the tension of the movie's blood-rush subject, an ordinary day that ends with a massacre similar to the Columbine murders. The director and the cinematographer employ a lulling master plan to recreate the breeziness of a typical high school day. The images in Elephant are so plangently real that they become almost surreal, abstract. And given the outcome, the lovingly filmed sequences before the slaughter have the effect of heightening the tragedy without overloading the picture with cheap, exploitative dread. Patty Jenkins and her cinematographer, Steven Bernstein, accomplish something similar with Monster, the dramatized version of the life of the serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Monster doesn't lapse into lurid, swooping camera moves to fashion a sensational scheme for sensationalized material. The movie delivers a subtler approach; the dank bar in which Aileen (Charlize Theron) meets her lover, Selby (Christina Ricci), has the drab look of a place people crawl into to get drunk. In Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, the intimacy emerges through Lance Acord's use of hand-held equipment to trail the dislocated American characters through their Tokyo adventures. The stylized camerawork brings to mind a series of distracted journal entries, never intended for consumption by anyone other than the diary keeper. It's a tricky thing to evoke through the look of a film, but Acord manages it. The art of providing an appropriately compelling look for little money seemed to be the order of the day among the independents in 2003. The Polish brothers' grim magic-realism tale, Northfork, was another case in point. It has a weathered, distressed appearance, but its cinematographer, M. David Mullen, also gave the picture a dense clarity, a visual counterpart to the mystical bent of the narrative. For the fable-like unfolding of Jim Sheridan's In America, Declan Quinn shifted from hard-grained harshness to an expressionist richness. And Eduardo Serra found a luscious film equivalent for Vermeer's paintings in Peter Webber's Girl With a Pearl Earring. Movies with bigger bankrolls appear to be appropriating the storybook visual charm of smaller, independent movies. In Gary Ross's Seabiscuit, John Schwartzman continued his move away from the lush, commercial punch of movies like The Rock and Pearl Harbor. He now feeds an appetite for more idiosyncratic films like Seabiscuit and last year's Rookie. He gave Seabiscuit the blurry warmth of family photo albums from the Depression. And he kept that soulfulness in the racetrack scenes. Much of the invention lavished by cinematographers on the films of 2003 came in stories about displacement. The subject invited the camera toward tone poems that suggest emptiness. Last year cinematographers reached a similar level of accomplishment, serving films they worked on instead of calling attention to their images. |
