Cinematography – the art of photography and camerawork in film-making.

Cinematographer – the one who directs said cinematography, deciding on which camera to use, the lighting and staging of each shot, and how the resulting footage will look.

A cinematographer’s job is much more focused than the director’s. The director will manage everything about the film and how those taking part in it’s creation will do so, whislt the cinematographer solely controls the visuals.

I would give Moonlight a 7/10.

The film had incredible cinematography and use of visuals. A scene that specifically stands out to me is when Chiron’s mother is yelling at him, and the scene has no sound and is slow. The camera cuts between the two of them, showing both of their perspectives. It is from the same height, which is used to exemplify how small Chiron is compared to his mother. This, paired with the shot’s silence, exemplifies that it doesn’t matter what she’s saying, because the part Chiron will remember will always be the way she yelled and the way it made him feel. Throughout Chiron’s childhood, we see many moments from his perspective and size. This scene feels like the culmination of all of these shots.

Nope’s (Jordan Peele, 2022) soundtrack, composed by Michael Abels. The music has a strong presence in songs like The Run to build energy for an incredulous scene, whilst songs like Making The Trap are very gentle, low themes to give a sense of the slow and tedious act of making the plan. Pursuit has very intense, slow music to make an incredibly tense and grand ending. Overall, the music is great, exhibits the feelings of each scene incredibly well, knows when to bow out and be silent, and also pays respect to a lot of genres that inspire it / it has links to (like some cowboy-ish whistling and stings as an ode to the Western genre).

Set Design

The set design in the opening scene where Arthur’s sign is broken is a very effective introduction to the world of the movie and the life of Arthur. Having the only bright and joyous thing injured and broken on the ground sets the hopeless tone and themes of the film, and having him be surrounded by bags of trash conveys to the audience that Arthur is seen this way by the rest of the film’s world; no more than trash to be left on the streets.

Costume

The usage of the clown masks in the train scene, worn by most of the people on the train, demonstrate perfectly the unification of the poor of Gotham, now identifying with Arthur’s actions. However, Arthur still wears much brighter colours in this scene – it can be said that vibrancy in this film represents freedom from oppression, which is something Arthur now has much more of due to his complete rejection of society’s rules and laws.

Space

In the Wayne Manor scene, the usage of space and the lack thereof is highly effective. The incredible distance from the gates to the manor show just how far Arthur is from the life he could’ve had, and, though separated by the gates (demonstrating class divide), there is little space between him and Bruce, which contrasts the previous message by showing that they could’ve each been on either side of the gate were they born into each other’s worlds.

Lighting

The lighting in the comedy club scene is very uncomfortable and oppressive. It feels hot and disorienting. Coming from behind the audience, it also hides their reactions – playing into the audience’s questioning of how reliable the narrator really is. The lights are on Arthur, just like in his dream of appearing on the Murray Show, which fully feeds into his delusions of perceived value.

Composition

We see the stair dancing scene from a low angle, showing the entire set of stairs in the background as Arthur continues to dance down them. These stairs have repeatedly represented the rungs to the ladder of Arthur’s place in the world – but now, instead of struggling to climb, he dances down, and we can see how far he has fallen and are left doubting how much further he can go. The light is behind him now, and he has chosen to abandon it.

Hair and Make-up

The hair and makeup in the scene when Arthur’s two friends visit, before he kills one, is very heavy and realistic. It defies the common movie trope that someone’s plan and downfall goes uninterrupted, and the unfinished, blotchy makeup mixed with the still drying hair fully encapsulates finding someone as they are spiralling.

Film Stock and Aspect Ratio

Joker has an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, helping with it’s long shots, but making it necessary to use other things in the scene to block parts of the camera to create claustrophobic feelings.

Best Picture: Falling Down 

Best Director: John Carpenter 

Best Actor: Kurt Russell 

Best Actress: Natasha Lyonne 

I struggled at first to think of an actress, because my taste in movies tends to be classics in which women were underrepresented and female characters were written with less depth. I picked Natasha Lyonne because of her acting in movies like ‘But I’m a Cheerleader’ and shows like ‘Orange is the New Black’. 

What Makes a Film Good? 

I like to think that a film is good when it succeeds at its purpose. A good comedy should be funny and light-hearted, a good horror should be scary. A movie that has a message is good if the message is represented well and received well. This also means that a movie that doesn’t succeed in terms of making money or fulfilling the promises of a genre can be good if it was a passion project, and the people who worked on making it enjoyed doing so. 

Another important factor to making a ‘good’ movie tends to be general quality. A mediocre story could become a big hit if it is edited and filmed in an interesting way, makes good use of staging, audio, location, and ever extra tool at it’s disposal. For an easy example, simply think of how many movies take place in iconic locations like London, New York, Las Vegas, etc. purely because such a setting can vastly improve success. 

However – movies aren’t just entertainment, or even quality. They are an industry, being a director, actor, producer, or any other worker on a set is a job, and production companies are, well, companies. The monetary success of movies simply cannot be ignored when considering if one is good or not, as making money is almost always at least the secondary purpose of making a movie. 

Take, for example, Falling Down, my favourite movie. With a budget of 25 million dollars, it grossed 96 million – and took top spot of the US box office for the two weeks following its release, pushing down Groundhog Day during this time. It was a monetary success, and was also a good movie for those who watched simply for entertainment.  

But in terms of the reception of the message, it’s a different story. The movie’s plot follows the character ‘D-FENS’ (known by this alias as the secondary plot follows the police’s investigation of him, where they refer to him by his car’s number plate) slowly losing more and more of his inhibitions as he finally decides to fight back against the things that anger him about the world, and also follows the character of Sergeant Prendergast following his spree of crimes and trying to stop him. 

There are multiple ways to interpret the themes of the movie, but I believe they are trying to say two main things; you can’t just suppress your unhappiness and anger, but you also can’t just release all of it on the world around you. Both of these lead to doom. These themes are best exemplified when you look at D-FENS and Prendergast’s stories side by side, where they aren’t opposites – rather, they are mirrors of each other, the only difference being that Prendergast mostly manages his issues in a healthy manner (aside from the occasional outburst). The other message the movie is trying to convey is how far people are willing to excuse crimes and immoral actions when faced with perspective and anger, as we see D-FENS clearly portrayed in the wrong for his increasingly terrible acts, but the movie only really solidifies him as the villain in the final act, when really the audience should’ve caught on much earlier. 

Unfortunately, it seems both of these messages failed to land for a lot of viewers – most review sites will have Falling Down listed as average at best, swaying between 50 – 75% positive. Though I don’t think this makes Falling Down a bad movie, as it still succeeds in its other facets, and the misunderstanding of how the movie presents the main character could even speak to the effectiveness of it’s second message, it can’t be ignored that for a lot of people, it didn’t hit the mark. 

To conclude, I think that a ‘good’ movie should succeed at what it attempts to do, whatever that may be – and I also do not believe that such a thing as a ‘bad’ movie exists, as there’s always someone out there who got enough enjoyment from it for it to have been worth their time and money. 

By ‘the spectrum of the arts’, Monaco is referring to the everchanging definition of what ‘art’ is – in the constant cycle of new ideas, methods, and styles being considered art, widening the spectrum, and then being factored away as part of something else and no longer considered an art, honing the definition of ‘art’ back down once more. These cores were originally history, comedy, tragedy, poetry, dance, astronomy, and music.

For example: over time, poetry branched off into lyric, dramatic and epic poetry, forming the subgroup ‘literary arts’ along with history, comedy, and tragedy. From here grew the need of structure, rules for these arts; grammar, logic, and rhetoric, all made so that it became simpler to categorize. As mathematics became more and more important, geometry replaced dance.

Further along in time, the lines between ‘art’ and ‘method’ slowly blurred, and the two melted together, to mean ‘skill’. If you were especially good at something, you had mastered the ‘art’ of it. But then, the definition started to head back to its original size– painting and creation, the ‘fine arts’ became closely linked to and eventually synonymous with ‘art’ itself, whilst the more structured, logic driven ‘arts’ like sciences and mathematics were slowly being removed. Art was no longer skill, it was creation.

This is just one example of the cycle of what is considered part of the spectrum of art, fluctuating as humanity develops, viewpoints change, and new technologies and means of expression are invented. Art is a ‘spectrum’ because it can’t and never will be defined – this is because art is relative to humanity, and we cannot be wholly confined to a definition either.

8/10
For me, the most memorable scene is when Arthur reads the files about himself, his mother, and Thomas Wayne in the stairwell. It is a big turning point for Arthur, as it can be seen as the moment he decides to continue fighting back. His killing before this were in self-defense, but from now on, he’s the attacker, and with anger. The camera in the scene is angled, shaky, and even a bit out of focus, allowing the audience to skim the important details instead of having a wall of text, and helping the audience to put themselves in Arthur’s shoes in terms of how disorienting the moment is.

Arthur’s laughing where another film would have crying is very unsettling, and has an even stronger emotional effect with the context that Arthur’s laughing is compulsory and uncontrollable even to the point of being painful. This discomfort paired with both the explicit and implied suffering of Arthur only makes the scene more effective.