If you are interested in cinematography, great cinematography, and great cinematographers, Cinematographer Style would probably be both a highly interesting and highly frustrating experience. Keep reading to find out why!
First of all, as an irrelevant piece of information (you can skip this paragraph if you just want to hear about the movie itself) I first heard about this movie from one of my former roommates. He was quite a young guy that I found on craig's list who was studying cinematography at Columbia College in Chicago. He mentioned that he knew a guy who was working on this production, and I think he may have even visited the set one day they were filming one of the cinematographers in the film. Anyways he made the whole thing sound very exciting and epic. A couple months later, after never moving anything else into the apartment except for a few articles of clothing and his guitar and sleeping on our couch until 2 PM every day, and after failing to pay any rent, he showed up in the middle of the night bloody and beat up after going back to a mafia owned bar that he had recently been fired from. After that he never really showed up again. Just one of a series of interesting roommate stories I had at that apartment. But again, that's all irrelevant.
Anyways, the structure of the movie Cinematographer Style is a montage of interviews with many famous cinematographers. And when I say many I mean one hundred and ten! This is actually not a number that you should be excited about, although the filmmakers don't seem to realize. With a running time of 86 minutes, this means that on average each person gets an average of fifty seconds of speaking time. Of course in actuality the more famous and respected cinematographers get more speaking time, but when you look at the special features and realize that at least for Vittorio Storaro and Gordon Willis that the filmmakers got at least close to an hour of quite interesting footage you wonder why they felt the need to pack so many people into this movie. And the first five minutes of the movie are just all of the 110 cinematographers in the movie reciting their name (for some of them this is probably about a fourth of the time they'll even get on screen, so why bother?). And at the end of the movie there is actually a piece of text stating something to the effect that due to scheduling there were many cinematographers they wanted in the movie that they couldn't get, and they suggest that maybe there should be a sequel! What's the point of stuffing more people in there if that just means that everyone else gets less time to talk? The reason I'm frustrated by this is because many of the people clearly have very interesting things to say, but they cut back and forth between people that we don't really get any sense of these people individually or their fully story. Again, you can watch the specials features to hear Vittorio and Gordon speak longer, but you lose that chance with a lot of other people in the film.
One other frustration is that, although you know these people have done some amazing work and they are making a lot of specific comments about their work, you never seen a single shot from any of their movies. Maybe the filmmakers couldn't get the rights to show segments from these movies. Or maybe they thought it wouldn't be fair to select which movies to show and which not to. Either way, it's hard to hear these people talking about their artwork which is in the same medium in which their interview is being shown to you, and yet you don't get to see any examples of it.
A lot of the cinematographers come to the same conclusions, and in the special features you can hear the director kind of prompt the interviewee to say certain things such as "the idea is more important than the tool or technique." But to hear each artists approach to this conclusion is what's interesting, not hearing a 110 headed monster coming to one single conclusion.
So in conclusion if you are are interested in cinematography at all you should watch this movie, but you may be frustrated by the quantity of interviews over the chance to really focus on any one person and the lack of examples of their work.
Spout usually asks us to include recommendations for other movies if you like the one that is being reviewed. In this case, I would recommend some of the movies that these great cinematographers actually worked on: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Roger Deakins), Memento (Wally Pfister), Apocalypse Now (Vittorio Storaro), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Haskell Wexler), The Godfather Part II (Gordon Willis)
Rating: 7/10