Directors VISIONS OF LIGHT tourney! (1 Viewer)

This Tourney is a competition between the films featured in the documentary Visions of Light.

This is primarily a tourney of cinematography, so ideally one should vote for the film they feel has better cinematography. I'll post four examples (plus the title comparisons of the cinematography of each film that is in competition that day as a reminder.

I've taken the list (from Imdb) of the films featured and narrowed it down to what I feel are the most competitive and worthy top 64.

So today I bring you the first match up (matchings will be posted here in a random order, having nothing to do with the seeding of the various matchs)

ROUND 1, MATCH 1
Star Wars ----------------------- vs ----------------------- How Green Was My Valley
DP Gilbert Taylor --------------------------------------------- DP Arthur Miller

I'll go with How Green Was My Valley

Shit, no wonder the HTF server crashed!

Great shots!

STAR WARS

Are those SW shots the ones that were tinkered with? I don't recall the original trilogy looking that good but either way my vote goes to HOW GREEN. The last two shots makes it the clear winner to me.

John Alton wouldn't have put Star Wars in Visions of Light if it didn't look great. The only thing done to any of these screengrabs (via power dvd) was the resolution was changed to 72dpi with a 400 pixel height. Whether or not the scene of Luke outside of the burning homestead was tinkered with I can't say. Those colors may have been in the original negative but never appeared so clearly when scene on a sixth generation print screened two thousand times. or it could be because that shot lasts all of three seconds when they cut away from a Luke close up to the long shot I used and then wipe to the death star. Also I didn't really notice the colors in that shot until I freeze framed it because it is on screen so quickly. I don't think the other shots would have been affected as much. The closeup character lighting in Star Wars is brilliant. ObiWan is lit slighly differently from Han or Luke when on Tatooine, and that particular scene "for over a thousand generations" is particularly exceptional.

Vader's entrance has always been one of my favorite photographic moments of the series, the black silhoette stepping through the smoke and fog and sea of white forms, moving over a mass of bodies.

The photography of Star wars is often overlooked, cinematographically, the scene with Leah and Tarkin is one of my favorites, the way Cushing uses his body and Lucas and Taylor use the framing to crush Leah between Tarkin and Vader and (hopefully) break her spirit.

All of these are hosted off site on my website, I can make them smaller if it becomes an issue for HTF. right now each is about 100k. I'm just glad I didn't start this monday as I planned.

Arthur Miller wrote an article in 1941 about the advances in interior lighting that let him shoot HGWMV, it's a great article and AC recently reprinted it. Also note his different closeup lighting on Hew (at the most romantic lighting he gets in the film) and Angharad

Time for the ol' coin flip...

Star Wars

How Green Was My Valley

I’d agree that Star Wars may not get is cinematographic due, but since some of the best shots are right out of the Leni Riefensthl playbook, I’ll cast my vote for

How Green Was My Valley.

A great idea Adam—and very fine examples.

Star Wars

Admittedly, it's difficult to disentangle certain aspects of the film from the film itself, but I think Star Wars is gorgeous, in particular its brilliant use of color and light. The expansiveness of the desert backdrops effectively conveys the desperation that Luke feels at home. One gets a real sense of a hero, oppressed by his environment, just waiting to break free and do great things.

The cinematography is both beautiful and essential in advancing the narrative.

Star Wars advances 5-4, I decided to let this run through the weekend to let people get a chance to see it. I'd have broken the previous tie for HGWMV.

The next round will be up shortly.

Nice sig. graphic Adam. Hopefully it will drum up some interest in the tourney.

ROUND 1, MATCH 2
Citizen Kane ----------------------- vs ----------------------- Do the Right Thing
DP Gregg Toland --------------------------------------------- DP Ernest Dickerson




Citizen Kane:











Do the Right Thing

by the way, after a match is ended I'll be shrinking down the previous images to a height of 150 pixels to better reduce the load on my site and hopefully faciltate the loading of this page, so you don't have to wait forever for a post at the bottom of the page to load.

Actually a tough decision, but I'll go with the flow:

Citizen Kane

Actually, not that tough a decision for me. Now, before someone comes in and accuses me of simply making the "canonical" choice, Citizen Kane has particular significance from a historical perspective. We've gotten used to it now, but it is one of a handful of films which changed cinematography forever.

Citizen Kane