Cinematography of the Year 2003

Yet another very difficult call this year. You could potentially make a case for all of the five films in my top 5. Although, really, the cinematography in Return of the King, good though it is, is essentially just a follow on from the efforts of the previous two films, the visualisations of the City of the Dead (in particular) and also Minas Tirith (the City of the Kings) is especially stunning and the film is worthy of inclusion in any discussion on those two visual megaliths alone.

Another two films outside my top 5 also merit attention for visual thrills. The first is the spectacular bloodbath that is Zatoichi. Katsumi Yanagishima clearly has an eye for blood and the powerful effect copious amounts of it can have on an audience. When done well, that is, and not crudely, as in another 2003 film, Kill Bill: Volume 1. Tarantino could take a lesson here (which, or so I would argue, he did for volume 2).

Three of the films in my top 5 (The Station Agent, All the Real Girls and Mystic River) come from the same visual plateau (Americana) yet each, especially taken together, show just how light, atmosphere and backdrop can so heavily both influence, and reflect, mood. Mystic River feels dark and foreboding throughout, like the secrecy and undercurrents of discomfort that layer the town and its inhabitants. All the Real Girls is classic David Gordon Green (though it is Tim Orr and not Adam Stone - see my previous post - on photography duty here), dreamy, sleepy, soulful, romantic, all light perfectly reflecting and encompassing sound, like the quiet ping of a raindrop on a spring pond. Beautiful and sensuous. And the Station Agent - quiet, lazy, dreamy, backwater America washed with a cinematic landscape which makes you want to live it and, indeed, live in it. If I had to choose between them, All the Real Girls would win. I just love the look and feel of Green's films and can't wait to see his latest effort, Snow Angels.

Lost in Translation (cinematography by Lance Acord) is a different animal entirely, looking radiant and dazzling, bejewelled by the throbbing neon lights of a Hong Kong reminiscent (but no more than that) of Christopher Doyle's heartached Hong Kong landscapes in the films of Wong Kar Wai. Lost in Translation pushes the eventual winner close too.

However, the 2003 award goes to the second film not in my top 5, the Polish brothers' Northfork. I would watch this again purely for M. David Mullen's photography. The look is a perfect balance between dreamworld and reality, as though the stark, ethereal and dolorous bright light, inhabited by its strange, unearthly creatures, is itself the delicate and lonely bridge between this world and the next, into which the town of Northfork is shortly to disappear. Atavistic and brilliant, the light divides the two worlds, and moods, of the film perfectly. Northfork is a very good film, though one that disappeared too quickly, and its cinematography is well worthy of this award, which it steals ahead of more famous, and more heralded, company. Indeed, the company it finds itself in, and, ultimately ahead of (in this category) in 2003, is testimony to Mullen's strange and beautiful achievement.