I inaugurate today a new section of this blog – with a new category “At the movies“. It takes a lot to make a movie: great actors, strong plot, a tailored soundtrack and good photography.
In “In the Mood for Love/花樣年華“, director Wong Kar-Wai (王家衛) did not lack any of the ingredients and next to the magnificent Maggie Cheung and an award-ready Tony Leung, he aligned Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-Bing for photography. It is said the former was replaced by the latter but I could not find confirmation of this. Together they made for some of the most interesting cinematography I have seen in a long long time.
In photography, one has a relatively large range of orientation: portrait, landscape, crooked, upside-down, etc. Movies however, limits this creative component to one, flat and common option: horizontal.
Wong Kar-Wai manages to counter this limitation with 2 distinctive techniques: first, and to me the most noticeable graphical characteristic, is the permanent sense of verticality the movie has. In the example above and the 2 stills below, notice how the frame is divided into action space, in focus, and the rest, out of focus, empty of story-telling interest, yet essential. The telephone, the walls, the window grid and the corridor, each play a part in the visual presence of each scene. Read the rest of this entry »
22.279990
114.158798
on Photography 