Cinematographers are dropping like flies! Around the turn of the new year, two influential cameramen passed on: Haskell Wexler (who won the final Oscar dedicated to black-and-white cinematography for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters of the Third Kind). A new five-film series showcases exceptional films from these men—and a few other remarkable cinematographers.
Douglas Slocombe (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and Jean Rabier (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) also died recently, so it’s a great time to talk about the dudes—they all seem to be dudes, unfortunately—who actually shoot your movies. A talented director of photography can make a good movie and save a bad one; the list of movies nearly ruined by incompetent directors but salvaged by expert DPs is substantial. And a cinematographer just made film history: With The Revenant, Emmanuel Lubezki (Birdman, Gravity) just became the first cinematographer to win three Academy Awards in a row.
If talk about light, shade, color, framing, and depth of field doesn’t get your juices flowing, though, simply enjoy the remarkable movies the Hollywood’s showing in their month-long Light and Shadows: Masters of Cinematography series.