Yesterday “Los Bostonian”, while callously dismissing the AI-authored “Celluloid Renegades” script, complained there’s too little in the way of elemental film passion on this site…”rarely any discussion of editing, lighting, screenwriting, shot composition.”
Okay, here’s a riff on lighting, or more particularly a comparison between (a) Pawel Edelman‘s beyond-brilliant cinematography, fortified by his soft and subdued but wonderfully calibrated lighting, on Roman Polanski‘s An Officer and a Spy (’19), which I re-watched a couple of nights ago, and (b) the occasionally muddy, oppressively under-illuminated, at times barely discernible lensing of Sinners by Autumn Durald Arkapaw.
Each and every frame of the Polanski is a bath…an eyeball massage…a capturing of Belle Epoque Paris that never stops hitting the sweet spot…never over- or under-lighted, every shot as perfect as it could possibly be for a period film of this sort. Easily in the class of John Alcott‘s Barry Lyndon, if not in a class of its own.
Too many people have written that Arkapaw’s lighting of the second half of Sinners (i.e., the nocturnal vampire stuff) is so depressingly under-lighted that at times it’s borderline unwatchable. When images are this soupy, something is very wrong.
Edelman’s lighting expertise is so far above and beyond what Arkapaw is apparently capable of or interested in…it’s almost unfair to mention them in the same sentence.
Edelman’s credits include Taylor Hackford‘s Ray, Steven Zallian‘s All the King’s Men, Andrzej Wajda‘s Walesa: Man of Hope, and Polanski’s The Ghost Writer (masterfully lighted). Arkapaw shot Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (no great shakes) and The Last Showgirl (never saw it).
Fair enough?
