Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
Cameramen and women discuss the craft and art of cinematography and of the "DP" (the director of photography), illustrating their points with clips from 100 films, from Birth of a Nation to Do the Right Thing. Themes: the DP tells people where to look; changes in movies (the arrival of sound, color, and wide screens) required creative responses from DPs; and, these artisans constantly invent new equipment and try new things, with wonderful results. The narration takes us through the identifiable studio styles of the 30s, the emergence of noir, the New York look, and the impact of Europeans. Citizen Kane, The Conformist, and Gordon Willis get special attention.
Visions of Light is a love letter to cinematography, and fittingly its greatest strength is how it showcases the art form it celebrates — the curated clips from 100 films are stunning and the talking-head cinematographers speak with genuine authority and passion. The structure is coherent, moving through cinema history thematically and chronologically, though as a documentary it's more survey than deep dive, which keeps Plot at a solid but unremarkable level. Acting is a non-category replaced by the subjects' on-screen presence, which is earnest if uneven. Novelty is reasonable — the subject matter was underexplored at the time and the film treats cinematographers as auteurs deserving recognition, but the documentary form itself is fairly conventional. The ending, however, fades without a strong concluding statement, landing on a somewhat anticlimactic note after the richness of what preceded it.