pictorial aspects of the cinema, and the film with the best cinematography is often the film that best fulfils the cinema’s potential as a pictorial art form.
For my favourite category, the Oscars usually reward splashy, spectacular films like Memoirs of a Geisha or The Aviator. However, most cinematographers insist that the art of cinematography is not necessarily an art of spectacle. In fact, if you ask a group of cinematographers (also known as DPs, or directors of photography) to describe their work, the typical response will sound like this: “When people tell me they thought the film was beautiful, then I know that I failed. Good cinematography is invisible.” Such a response might suggest that cinematographers are paragons of modesty, but they are actually a very confident group, quick to cite Rembrandt and Caravaggio as the distinguished forebears of their