AFT Awards: Best Cinematography

This is the fifth category of the 1st Annual AFT Film Awards to be announced. The AFT Awards are my own personal choices for the best in film of each year and the best in television of each season. The AFT Film Awards include the traditional Oscar categories and a number of additional specific honors. Nominees are listed in alphabetical order by film title. Winners will be announced in late February.

Runners-up:
INTO THE WILD
FIRST SNOW
THERE WILL BE BLOOD
THE DARJEELING LIMITED
A MIGHTY HEART

The nominees:
AFTER THE WEDDING (Morten Soborg)
Look no further than that significant scene towards the beginning of the film at the wedding. Not since Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill Volume 2” have I seen such intricate and deliberate camerawork which is essentially so simple but so devastatingly effective.

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES (Roger Deakins)
Vast, lengthy shots of empty fields prowled only by the vilest kinds of people are made all the more dazzling by their frequent contrasts to the antique-looking capsule snapshots into Jesse’s past. The most impressive scene: the train robbery.

ATONEMENT (Seamus McGarvey)
The brilliant filming of this movie is not limited to that five-minute tracking shot on the beach that you have either heard about or seen. The camera takes an important step back from the action to allow the viewer to form his own opinions first before zooming in to take a closer look at what is actually going on, much like some of the characters in the film.

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (Janusz Kaminski)
The camera literally inhabits the eye of the protagonist and puts the viewer directly in his place. For a while they cannot even grasp the full world around them, just as main character Jean-Do cannot. By the time the camera finally pans out and looks at things from a different perspective, the audience is relieved and feels triumphant in having achieved this new line of sight.

THE LIVES OF OTHERS (Hagen Bogdanski)
The filming here is simple and deliberate but so fantastic. Whether it is a close-up on the face of a man slowly finding emotion or a tracking shot following an efficient “fixer” the stairs, this film is made immensely watchable by its brilliant camerawork.