52 | Sight&Sound | April 2020
ROGER DEAKINS2
SWEET FREEDOM
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Some would call this film’s lasting popularity
mystifying, but that’s a trap: Frank Darabont’s prison
drama endures because it’s a simple story well told.
And when Morgan Freeman isn’t doing the telling (in
sonorous voiceover), Deakins’s camera is the chief
communicator, as is often the case with breakout
movies, from A Man Escaped (1956) to Toy Story 3 (2010).
You would never call any of his shots methodical
or rote. Rather, they chip away toward the goal of
pure visual euphoria, which arrives with Deakins’s
lightning-lit rainstorm. Escaped convict Andy Dufresne
(Tim Robbins) is free after crawling his way through
half a mile of shit, and the camera pushes behind him,
wading through an outlet pipe’s waste water. Then we
come around and rise, looking down at the transformed
man, arms outstretched, reborn. The image would
become Deakins’s first immortal bit of magic.
1
APPROACHING ROOM 101
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
Strictly speaking, the career doesn’t begin here –
there had been shorts and documentaries, a smattering
of music videos (including Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rockit’)
and Michael Radford’s austere 1983 wartime romance
Another Time, Another Place. But with this striking,
desaturated take on Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare, an
artist is born. Deakins and Radford had hoped to shoot in
black and white, but the producers frowned. Deakins’s
inspired solution was a revival of the tricky bleach-
bypass process, a chemical overlay largely unused for
decades (and later reclaimed by the cinematographer
Darius Khondji for Se7en) resulting in shimmering,
silvery blacks and muted, defeated blues. Every facet
of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s greyscape is exquisite – as are
its looming Big Brother telescreens, created in-camera
for this pre-CGI production. But the really memorable
shot is a track behind Winston (John Hurt) down a
dark, dingy hallway, until a doorway opens before
him, revealing a lush, green paradise of the mind.3
GREAT WHITE NORTH
Fargo (1995)
Deakins had already collaborated twice
with the brothers from Minnesota, first on their
1991 Palme d’Or-winning Barton Fink, then on their
Preston Sturges-esque screwball The Hudsucker
Proxy (1994). Either film would be the high point
of another shooter’s résumé. But Fa rg o signals a
further refinement of their shared visual language,
here honed into something bone-dry and ice-cold.
This is a movie with its own weather: violent gusts,
blinding vistas and, in counterpoint to Carter
Burwell’s lovely score, the crunch of windshield-
scraping. Unusually for a comedy, Deakins supplies
an overall mood of fatalistic, almost Herzogian irony;
some of these characters are too soft to survive,
expiring in a puff of down or a smear of red goo.
Pregnant police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances
McDormand) watches over everything like a hawk,
but the moment that haunts us is Steve Buscemi’s
“funny-looking” crook burying a briefcase of
money in an unforgivingly banal field of snow.