Light That Floods Your Brain

I think I might have felt a little better about Lincoln if Janusz Kamsinski‘s cinematography hadn’t been so oppressively about white alien-space-ship light pouring through large draped windows and into dark and murky rooms in which men are seen talking and smoking and taking the temperature of the times. If he had shot it more in the style of, say, Frank Tidy‘s lensing of The Grey Fox (’82)….that would’ve worked. (Screen captures from DVD Beaver’s review of new Lincoln Bluray.)

Posted at by
  • Mark

    There is a four disc bluray available that has a lot more extra features.

  • MisterQuigley

    Electricity was a great invention…

  • http://profiles.google.com/dgeiser13 Dan Geiser

    Oh, sure. Drag Farnsworth into it.

  • patches23

    I’d love to see The Grey Fox released on digital media. Too bad about that one.

  • Bob Hightower

    LINCOLN hate again???

  • joeybot

    This is kind of like that shitty Godfather movie, where you couldn’t see the characters that well and they didn’t use many lights and it was murky, and I was mostly interested in the idea that maybe Don Corleone had a cat lamp in the corner, like all the Italians do.

  • Krazyeyes

    I finally got a chance to see Lincoln and thought it looked fantastic. Not sure what your hate-on is about but I can only guess that we can now add “milky lighting” to your list of eccentric peccadilloes.

  • http://www.hollywood-elsewhere.com/ Jeffrey Wells

    No, not more Lincoln “hate.” This column is a moving train and a movable feast, and I’m simply responding to frame captures in DVD Beaver’s review of the Lincoln Bluray. God, I have to keep explaining this stuff over and over.

  • fahrenheit290

    Can I just say Kaminski’s overbearing style has ruined more than just a few Spielberg films for me to the point where they are often styleless, derivative. God, I wish Spielberg would switch up his team once and a while, the end products have become so damn predictable. In addition to Lincoln (which I would have welcomed a different dp), Crystal Skull was another one that failed to capture the grit, the realness of the original Indiana Jones films—though that one obviously had more serious problems than the cinematography. War Horse too was overly saturated, excessively bright so that it seemed fake for me—and that contributed to its heavy-handed sentimentality. I hate that many films have taken this direction as filmmakers adapted digital and too much color correction/alteration in post. I miss the Slocombe style of Close Encounters and Raiders, how the light was captured. For me these films feel less like the “perfect” photo-like quality of Lincoln (which fails to capture Wyeth, who Spielberg says influenced that style) or War Horse and more cinematic, of the cinema. Though to Kaminski’s credit, one film I wiil say that I thoroughly enjoyed his work was Minority Report.