226 CHAPTER 6 CINEMATOGRAPHY
story, mise-en-scène, and acting do. The cinemato -
grapher (also known as the director of photogra-
phy, or DP) uses the camera as a maker of meaning,
just as the painter uses the brush or the writer uses
the pen: the angles, heights, and movements of the
camera function both as a set of techniques and as
expressive material, the cinematic equivalent of
brushstrokes or of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. So,
in order to make an informed analysis and evalua-
tion of a movie, we need to consider whether the
cinematographer, in collaboration with the other
filmmakers on the project, has successfully har-
nessed the powers of this visual language to help
tell the story and convey the meaning(s) of the
movie. As director Satyajit Ray puts it, “There is
no such thing as good photography per se. It is
either right for a certain kind of film, and therefore
good; or wrong—however lush, well-composed,
meticulous—and therefore bad.”^1The Director of Photography
Every aspect of a movie’s preproduction—writing
the script, casting the talent, imagining the look of
the finished work, designing and creating the sets
and costumes, and determining what will be placed
in front of the camera and in what arrangement
and manner—leads to the most vital step: repre-
senting the mise-en-scène on film or video.
Although what we see on the screen reflects the
vision and design of the filmmakers as a team, the
director of photography is the primary person
responsible for transforming the other aspects of
moviemaking into moving images.
Freddie Young, who won Best Cinematography
Oscars for three David Lean movies—Lawrence of
Arabia(1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and Ryan’s
Daughter(1970)—defines the DP’s job within the
overall process of film production:
[The cinematographer] stands at the natural conflu-
ence of the two main streams of activity in the pro-
duction of a film—where the imagination meets the
reality of the film process.What Is Cinematography?
Cinematographyis the process of capturing mov-
ing images on film or a digital storage device. The
word comes to us from three Greek roots—kinesis,
meaning “movement”; photo, meaning “light”; and
graphia, meaning “writing”—but the word was
coined only after motion pictures themselves were
invented. Cinematography is closely related to still
photography, but its methods and technologies
clearly distinguish it from its static predecessor.
This chapter introduces the major features of this
unique craft.
Although cinematography might seem to exist
solely to please our eyes with beautiful images, it is
in fact an intricate language that can (and in the
most complex and meaningful films, does) con-
tribute to a movie’s overall meaning as much as the
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, you should be
able to
✔describe the differences among a shot, a
setup, and a take.
✔understand the role that a director of
photography plays in film production.
✔describe the basic characteristics of the
cinematographic properties of a shot:
film tock, lighting, and lenses.
✔understand the basic elements of
composition within the frame, including
implied proximity to the camera, depth,
camera angle and height, scale, and
camera movement.
✔define the rule of thirds.
✔describe any shot in a movie by identifying- its proximity to its subject.
- the angle of the camera.
- the nature of camera movement, if any,
within the shot. - the speed and length of the shot.
✔understand the ways in which special
effects are created and the various roles
that special effects play in movies.
(^1) Satyajit Ray, Our Films, Their Films(1976; repr., New York:
Hyperion, 1994), p. 68.