April 2020 | Sight&Sound | 534
DREAMING OF THE MOUNTAINS
Kundun (1997)
There’s a curious emotional distance to
Martin Scorsese’s widescreen retelling of the Dalai
Lama’s mid-20th-century exile from Tibet, impeccable
though it is. To these eyes, that’s intentional, all
the better to invite curious viewers to make an
investment of effort into feeling the story: Kundun
is an invitation to faith. By this point, Deakins had
a few scenic knockouts to his name – notably Bob
Rafelson’s Mountains of the Moon, 1990 – but his
documentarian’s eye is always roving and intelligent,
never merely a conduit for empty voluptuousness.
The final shot of Scorsese’s film is fascinatingly
self-reflexive: a young man scans the Himalayas by
telescope, seeking home and yearning to return. It’s
a brilliant metaphor for this director’s career-long
obsession with locating a spiritual dimension in
the act of careful observation. Deakins’s work here
feels like perceptive film criticism; call it a crime,
then, that it’s his only pairing with Scorsese to date.5
DEEP SOUTH ODYSSEY
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
Developed in tandem with the Coens’ ironic
stillness (Fargo, No Country for Old Men), there’s a more
playful mode here – not so much zany as uninhibited.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? will serve to represent this
brand of mania (with our apologies to superfans of
The Big Lebowski and A Serious Man, both of them also
shot by Deakins). Revered by cinematographers, O
Brother is the first live-action film to be extensively
colour-corrected via computer; the Coens were after a
sepia-tinted, old-timey softness and their Mississippi
locations were far too verdant. For a reported 11 weeks
Deakins redialled digital levels and inspected the
yellowed results, a labour of love that would become
commonplace in post-production. Ultimately, the
effect is dreamy, uncanny and expressive in its own
right – perfectly utilised when the Soggy Bottom Boys
are lulled into submission by a trio of riverside sirens.
6
GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY
The Assassination of Jesse James
by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
If you were looking for a single sequence that contained
everything Deakins did expertly, this rapturous
locomotive heist in Andrew Dominik’s revisionist
western would be it. A summation of Deakins’s career
smuggled into an unsuspecting director’s movie,
the scene showcases the cinematographer’s beloved
bleach-bypass treatment from Nineteen Eighty-Four,
adding extra texture to midnight blacks. Smoke
and chiaroscuro swirl as the train’s stark headlight
penetrates the tall trees; sparks fly from brake plates.
Vignetted by a soft-focus blur on the edge of the frame,
Deakins’s fable-like feel is breathtaking, propelling
the story into the realm of Leone-esque mythology.
Dominik came into his project with an already
impressive vision board, one influenced by pastoral
painter Andrew Wyeth and films like Days of Heaven
(1979). But his own director of photography one-upped
him via an amalgamated style that harked back to
the earliest silent cinema while feeling utterly fresh.